The Abominable Man (7 page)

A man who lays hands on a policeman always gets caught. Not because the general public takes a solid stand behind the forces of law and order—as it does, for example, in England or the socialist countries—but because the police chief’s entire private army suddenly knows what it wants, and, what’s more, wants it very badly.

Martin Beck stood on Regeringsgatan enjoying the chilly freshness of the early morning.

He wasn’t armed, but in the inside right-hand pocket of his coat he was carrying a stenciled circular from National Police Headquarters. It was a copy of a recent sociological
study, and he’d found it on his desk the day before.

The police force took a very dim view of sociologists—particularly in recent years since they’d started working more and more with the activities and attitudes of policemen—and all their pronouncements were read with great suspicion by the men at the top. Perhaps the brass realized that in the long run it would prove untenable simply to insist that everyone involved in sociology was actually a communist or some other subversive.

Sociologists were capable of anything, as Superintendent Malm had recently pointed out in one of his many moments of indignation. Martin Beck, among others, was supposed to look on Malm as his superior.

Maybe Malm was right. Sociologists got all kinds of ideas. For example, they came up with the fact that you no longer needed better than a D average to get into the Police Academy, and that the average IQ of patrolmen in Stockholm had dropped to 93.

“It’s a lie!” Malm had shouted. “And what’s more it isn’t true! And on top of that it isn’t any lower than in New York!”

He’d just returned from a study tour in the States.

The report in Martin Beck’s pocket revealed a number of interesting new facts. It proved that police work wasn’t a bit more dangerous than any other profession. On the contrary, most other jobs involved much greater risks. Construction workers and lumberjacks lived considerably more hazardous lives, not to mention longshoremen or taxi drivers or housewives.

But hadn’t it always been generally accepted that a policeman’s lot was riskier and tougher and less well paid than any other? The answer was painfully simple. Yes, but only because no other professional group suffered
from such role fixation or dramatized its daily life to the same degree as did the police.

It was all supported by figures. The number of injured policemen was negligible when compared with the number of people annually mistreated by the police. And so forth.

And it didn’t apply only to Stockholm. In New York, for example, an average of seven policemen were killed every year, whereas taxi drivers perished at the rate of two a month, housewives one a week, and among the unemployed the rate was one a day.

To these odious sociologists nothing was holy. There was a Swedish team that had even managed to torpedo the myth of the English bobby and reduce it to its proper proportions, namely, to the fact that the English police are not armed and therefore don’t provoke violence to the same degree as certain others. Even in Denmark responsible authorities had managed to grasp this fact, and only in exceptional situations were policemen permitted to sign out weapons.

But such was not the case in Stockholm.

Martin Beck had suddenly started thinking about this study as he stood looking at Nyman’s body.

And now it came to mind again. He realized that the conclusions that document drew were correct, and paradoxically enough he sensed some sort of connection between those conclusions and the murder that occupied him at the moment.

It’s not dangerous to be a policeman, and in fact it’s the policemen who are dangerous, and a little while ago he’d been looking down at the butchered body of a policeman.

To his surprise, the corners of his mouth started to quiver, and for a moment it felt as if he were going to sit
down on the steps leading from Regeringsgatan down to Kungsgatan and burst into laughter at the whole situation.

But with the same curious logic it suddenly occurred to him that he’d better go home and get his pistol.

It was over a year since he’d even looked at it.

An empty cab came up the street from Stureplan.

Martin Beck stuck out his hand and got it to stop.

It was a yellow Volvo with a black stripe along the sides. This was a relatively recent innovation and a relaxation of the old rule that all taxicabs in Stockholm had to be black. He climbed into the front seat next to the driver.

“Köpmangatan eight,” he said.

And as he said it he recognized the driver. He was one of those policemen who eke out their incomes by driving a cab during their off-duty hours. That he recognized the man was pure coincidence. Several days earlier, outside the Central Station, he’d watched two unusually maladroit patrolmen drive an initially peaceable young drunk into a belligerent rage and then lose control of themselves. The man behind the wheel was one of them.

He was about twenty-five years old and extremely garrulous.

He was probably talkative from birth, and since his regular job permitted him only an occasionally angry grunt, he made up for it here in his cab.

One of the Sanitation Department’s combination sweep-and-spray trucks temporarily blocked their path. The moonlighting patrolman fretfully studied a billboard advertising Richard Attenborough’s
10 Rillington Place.

“Ten Rollington Palace, hunh?” he said in some sort of dialect. “And people want to see that kind of crap.
Murder and misery and crazy people. If you ask me it’s a damned shame.”

Martin Beck nodded. The man, who obviously didn’t recognize him, took the nod as encouragement and talked volubly on.

“But you know it’s all these foreigners that make all the trouble.”

Martin Beck said nothing.

“But I will say one thing, you’re making a big mistake if you lump all foreigners together in one bag. The guy who drives this cab with me, he’s Portuguese, for example.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, and you couldn’t find a better man. He works his ass off, doesn’t lie around on his butt. And can he drive! And do you know why?”

Martin Beck shook his head.

“Yeah, well, he drove a tank in Africa for four years. You know, Portugal’s fighting a war of liberation down there, place called Angola. They’re fighting like hell for their freedom down there, the Portuguese, but you never hear anything about it here in Sweden. This guy, the guy I’m talking about, he shot hundreds of commies those four years. And on him it really shows what a good thing the army is, and discipline and all that. He does exactly what you tell him, and he rakes in more dough than anyone else I know. And if he gets some drunk Finn bastard in the car, well, he sees to it he gets a hundred percent tip. They’ve got it coming, all those bums on welfare.”

Just then, fortunately, the car stopped outside the building where Martin Beck lived. He told the driver to wait, let himself into the building and rode up to his apartment.

The pistol was a 7.65 mm Walther and lay in its
place in a locked drawer of his desk. The clips were also where they belonged, in another locked drawer in the other room. He slipped one of them into the pistol and put the other in his right-hand coat pocket. But he had to hunt for five minutes before he could find his shoulder holster, which was lying in a pile of old neckties and T-shirts on a shelf in the closet.

Back down on the street, the effusive cop stood leaning against his yellow taxi, happily humming to himself. He held the door politely, climbed in behind the wheel and had already opened his mouth to resume his text when Martin Beck interrupted.

“Kungsholmsgatan thirty-seven, please,” he said.

“But that’s the …”

“Right, Criminal Division. Drive along Skeppsbron, please.”

The driver immediately turned red in the face and didn’t utter a sound the whole way there.

And that was welcome, Martin Beck thought. In spite of everything, he loved this city, and right at this place and at this time of day it was perhaps at its most beautiful. The morning sun was shining across Strömmen, and the surface of the water was smooth and calm and didn’t reveal the terrible pollution that was unfortunately a fact. In his youth—in fact a lot more recently than that—you could go swimming here.

Down along the city quay lay an old cargo steamer with a tall straight stack and a black spar on the mainmast. You rarely saw them any more these days. An early Djurgård ferry was cutting through the water with a crisp little wave along its bows. He noticed that the smokestack was completely black and the name on the side was covered with white paint. But he recognized it anyway. The
Djurgård
5.

“Do you want a receipt?” asked the driver in a stifled voice outside the doors to the police building.

“Yes, thanks.”

Martin Beck went up to the offices of the Violence Division, studied some documents, made a few phone calls and did a little writing.

At the end of an hour he’d managed to put together a brief and very superficial summary of a human life. It began like this:

Stig Oscar Emil Nyman.

Born November 6, 1911, in Säffle.

Parents: Oscar Abraham Nyman, logging foreman, and Karin Maria Nyman, née Rutgersson.

Schooling: Two years elementary school in Säffle, two years grade school in Säffle, five years secondary school in Åmål.

Joined professional infantry 1928, lance corporal 1930, corporal 1931, sergeant 1933, Noncommissioned Officer’s School.

And then Stig Oscar Emil Nyman had become a policeman. First as a deputy sheriff in Värmland, then as a regular police constable in Stockholm. During the depression in the thirties. His military experience was counted in his favor and led to quick promotions.

At the beginning of the Second World War he resumed his military career, was promoted and given a number of obscure special assignments. During the latter part of the war he was transferred to Karlsborg, but in 1946 he went into the reserve and one year later reappeared on the personnel roster of the Stockholm police, this time as a sergeant.

When Martin Beck went through the inspector’s course in 1949, Nyman was already a deputy chief inspector and was given his first precinct command a few years later.

As a chief inspector, Nyman had at different times
been chief of several precincts in the inner city. From time to time he’d been back at the old police headquarters on Agnegatan, again on assignments of a special nature.

He had spent the greater part of his life in uniform, but in spite of that was one of the men who had long been in the good graces of the highest police command.

Only circumstances had kept him from advancing even further and becoming chief for the regular metropolitan police in its entirety.

What circumstances?

Martin Beck knew the answer to that question.

At the end of the fifties, the Stockholm police department had undergone a substantial shake-up. There had been an infusion of fresh leadership and fresh air. Military thinking ceased to be so popular, and reactionary ideas were no longer necessarily an asset. The changes at headquarters spread to a certain extent out into the precincts, automatic promotion became less routine, and certain phenomena, among them the Prussian spit-and-polish of the regular police, died in the wake of the move toward greater democracy. Nyman was one of many who had watched his bridges burn before him.

It seemed to Martin Beck that the first half of the sixties had been an auspicious period in the history of the Stockholm police. Everything had seemed to be improving, common sense had been about to conquer rigidity and cliquishness, the recruiting base had been broadened, and even relations with the public had seemed to be getting better. But nationalization in 1965 had broken the positive trend. Since then, all the good prospects had been betrayed and all the good intentions laid to rest.

For Nyman, however, it came too late. It was now almost seven years since he’d had his last precinct command.

During that time he’d worked mostly on things like civil defense.

But no one had been able to take away his reputation as an expert in maintaining order, and he had been eagerly consulted as a specialist in connection with the frequent large demonstrations toward the end of the sixties.

Martin Beck scratched the back of his neck and read through the last few lines of his inconsequential notes.

Married 1945, two children in the marriage, daughter Annelotte born 1949 and son Stefan born 1956.

Early retirement due to illness 1970.

He picked up his ballpoint pen and wrote:

Died in Stockholm, April 3, 1971.

Read through the whole thing one more time. Looked at the clock. Ten minutes to seven.

He wondered how things were going for Rönn.

The city woke up and yawned and stretched.

As did Gunvald Larsson. Woke up, yawned and stretched. Then he put a large hairy hand on the electric alarm clock, threw off the blanket and swung his long shaggy legs out of bed.

He put on his bathrobe and slippers and walked over to the window to check the weather. Dry, fair, thirty-seven degrees. The suburb he lived in was called Bollmora and consisted of some high-rise apartment buildings in the woods.

Then he looked in the mirror and saw a very large blond man, still six feet three and a half inches tall, but weighing in these days at 230 pounds. He got a little
heavier with every year, and it was no longer pure muscle that bulged beneath the while silk robe. But he was in good shape and felt stronger than ever, which was saying a good deal. For several seconds he stared into his own porcelain-blue eyes under a wrinkled brow. Then he combed his blond hair back with his fingers, pulled open his lips and examined his large strong teeth.

He got the morning paper from the mail slot and went out to the kitchen to make breakfast. There he made tea—Twining’s Irish Breakfast—and toast and boiled two eggs. He got out the butter, some Cheddar cheese and Scottish marmalade, three different kinds.