by Maj Sjowall
Then he roared:
“Out! Get out! Scram!”
Kristiansson and Kvant tumbled out of the room. Their appearance was now not particularly sculptural.
“Jesus!” said Kristiansson, wiping the sweat from his brow.
“So,” Kvant said, “that’s the last time I’m going to tell you, Kalle. You should see nothing, and you should hear nothing, but if you happen to see or hear anything, then for Christ’s sake, you must report it.”
“Jesus,” said Kristiansson, unimaginatively.
Twenty-four hours later, Gunvald Larsson had thoroughly, stage by stage, thought out everything and even succeeded in formulating it all into comprehensible sentences down on paper. As follows:
At 23:10 hours on 7th March, 1968, the house in Sköldgatan caught fire. The official name of the building is 37 Ringvägen. At 23:10 hours of the same day and year, a hitherto unidentified person called the exchange at the fire station in Solna-Sundbyberg to say that fire had broken out at 37 Ringvägen. As there is a street called Ringvägen in Sundbyberg, the firemen went to this. At the same time routine messages on the presumed fire went to the police and Central Alarm for Stockholm Region, to avoid duplication. About 23:15 hours Patrolman Zachrisson called from a telephone booth in Rosenlundsgatan to Central Alarm and reported a fire at 37 Ringvägen, without further identification of district. As the duty officer at Central Alarm had just received the message from Solna-Sundbyberg, he thought it was about the same fire and told Patrolman Zachrisson that a fire engine had gone out and should be already at the site of the fire. (It was, but at Ringvägen in Sundbyberg.) At 23:21 Patrolman Zachrisson again called Central Alarm, this time from an alarm box. As this time, according to his own statement, he expressed himself: “There’s a fire! There’s a fire in Sköldgatan!” there was no possible misunderstanding. As a result the firemen went to 37 Ringvägen in Stockholm, in other words, to the house in Sköldgatan.
It was not Patrolman Zachrisson who called the fire department in Solna-Sundbyberg.
Conclusions: The fire was deliberate and caused by a chemical incendiary with a timed detonator. This may, if Patrolman Zachrisson’s testimony is to be believed, have been placed in Malm’s apartment at 21:00 hours at the latest. In that case, the timing mechanism was set for three hours. During this time the perpetrator had time to move freely in any direction. The only person who with any certainty could have known that the fire was to break out at 23:10 hours is the person who planned (or instigated, if instigation exists) the fire. Thus it is probable that it was this person who called the fire department in Sundbyberg.
Question No. 1: Why did this person call the wrong fire station? Possible answer: Because he happened to find himself in Solna or Sundbyberg and because his knowledge of Stockholm and its surroundings were poor.
Question No. 2: Why did this person call the fire station at all? Possible answer: Because he wished to murder Malm and had no desire to kill or injure the other ten people in the building. In my opinion this aspect is significant, insofar as it emphasizes even more the careful planning and the professional character of the crime.
Gunvald read through what he had written. He thought for a few minutes and then crossed out the last letter in messages and the police and. He did this with a ballpoint pen and so thoroughly that a laboratory examination would have been necessary if the original words were to be deciphered.
“Gunvald is on the track of something,” Martin Beck said.
“Oh, is he?” said Kollberg skeptically. “A bit of railway track, I suppose?”
“No. This is something constructive. The first real clue.”
Kollberg read through the report.
“Bravo, Larsson!” he said. “This is tops. Especially the brevity of the sentences. ‘Or instigated, if instigation exists.’ That’s brilliant.”
“D’you think so?” said Gunvald Larsson amiably.
“Joking apart,” said Kollberg, “all we’ve got to do now is to find this darned guy Olofsson and then link him with the telephone call. But how’re we going to do that?”
“Simple,” said Gunvald Larsson. “A girl answered the telephone. I expect she can identify his voice. Telephone operators are usually good at that sort of thing. Unfortunately she’s on holiday and can’t be got at. But she’ll be back in three weeks.”
“And before that we simply must get hold of Olofsson,” said Kollberg.
“Yes,” Rönn said.
That was all that was said on the afternoon of Friday the twenty-ninth of March.
The days went by. A new month began. Another week passed. Soon almost two. And still no trace of the man called Bertil Olofsson.
19
Malmö is Sweden’s third largest city and is very different indeed from Stockholm. It has less than a third of the number of inhabitants and sprawls over a flat plain, while Stockholm is built on a system of elevated islands. Malmö also lies 360 miles farther south and is the country’s port to the Continent. The rhythm of life is calmer there, the atmosphere less aggressive, and even the police are said to be more friendly and attuned to society, just as the climate is milder. It often rains, but seldom gets really cold, and long before the ice begins to thaw around Stockholm, the waves in Öresund are rippling against flat sandy shores and limestone plateaus.
Spring usually comes early, in comparison with the rest of the country, and the months of February, March and April often come as a surprise with their sun and clear views and occasional dead calm.
Saturday, the sixth of April of this year was a day like that.
The Easter school holidays had started and many people had gone away, if no more than for a weekend to look at their summer cottages and visit friends and acquaintances in the country. The leaves were not yet out, but their time was not far off and yellow spring flowers were already blooming along the roadsides.
In Industrihammen, which lies in the northeast part of the city, this particular Saturday afternoon was exceptionally still, in itself a natural phenomenon, as the area not only lies quite a long way outside the city center, but also could hardly be described as attractive either to walkers or to people taking trips in their cars; long silent docks with drooping cranes and immobile freight cars, heaps of timber and piles of rusty iron girders, the isolated bark of some lonely watchdog inside an enclosed factory site and a few moored Danish sand-excavators, the crews of which had gone back home for Easter. Outside one of the locked warehouses stood 200 bright blue tractors which had just come by ship from England and which would soon be delivered to purchasers in the surrounding farm districts.
Apart from the dog, the slight sounds from the oil refinery a few hundred yards farther away was all that could be heard. There was a smell of crude oil too, sufficient to irritate people with sensitive noses.
Over the whole area there were only two visible human beings, a couple of small boys lying on their stomachs, fishing. They were lying close together, their legs apart, their heads hanging over the edge of the wharf. These two young men had much in common. Both were six and a half years old, both were dark-haired, browneyed and looked sunburned, although technically speaking it was still winter.
They had walked here from their wretched homes at the east end of the city, sheath knives in their belts and fishing lines rolled up in their pockets. Then they had run about for an hour or so among the 200 tractors and sat on at least fifty of them. They had also found a couple of empty bottles which they had thrown into the water and then hurled stones at them, without hitting them, and an old abandoned fork-truck, ready for the scrap heap, from the engine of which they had succeeded in unscrewing a few interesting and, in their eyes, valuable parts. And now they were lying on the wharf, fishing, which was really why they had come.
These youngsters were not Swedish, which to some extent explained their behavior. No native of the country, even at their age, would ever think of fishing here, simply because their chances of catching anything were about as great as finding
a live herring in a can of anchovies. Here there was nothing but muddy old eels foraging about in the slime of the harbor-bed. And they are not caught on a hook.
The boys were named Omer and Miodrag and they were Yugoslavs. Their fathers were dockworkers and their mothers worked in a textile factory. Neither of them had lived here long enough to master the language. Miodrag could say, “one, two, three,” but that was all. Their prospects of learning much more were not very great, as they spent their days in a day nursery in which 70 per cent of the children were foreigners, and their parents were going to return home as soon as they had earned sufficient money to make them feel wealthy.
They lay quite still and stared down into the water, and both were thinking that soon a giant fish would bite, perhaps such a big strong one that they would be pulled into the water and drowned in the harbor basin. At that very moment, something happened which happens only very seldom and then only under special climatic and hydrological conditions. At a quarter past three on this still, sunny afternoon, a belt of fresh pure water which had come drifting in on the currents from outside the strait, slowly moved through the dirty harbor basin. Suddenly Omer and Miodrag discovered they could see their fishing lines under the water too, and then they saw the leads and even the worm they had as bait. The water slowly grew clearer and clearer until they could see the bottom and an old chamber pot and a rusty iron girder. And then they saw, perhaps ten yards out from the dock, something which filled them with utter astonishment, immediately setting their imaginations in a whirl.
The object was a car. They saw it quite clearly. It appeared to be blue and it was standing with its rear end facing the wharf, the doors closed and the wheels sunk in the mud, just as if someone had parked it there, in a market square in a secret city on the bottom of the sea. As far as they could see, it was quite whole and not in the least buckled or damaged.
And then the water began to thicken again, the vehicle down there vanishing before their eyes, and only a minute or two later neither the car, nor the chamber pot, nor either fishing line was visible, only the dirty gray-green surface of the water with its mother-of-pearl sheen of gasoline and gray sticky lumps of escaped oil.
They looked around for someone to whom they could show their discovery, or at least tell, for there was no longer anything to show. But Industrihammen was empty and deserted on this lovely Saturday in April and even the lonely watchdog had stopped barking.
Omer and Miodrag rolled up their fishing lines and stuffed them into their pockets, already bulging with old plugs and bits of copper piping and rusty nuts and bolts. Then they ran off, as far as they could manage, but when they were forced to stop for breath, they were still in the eastern harbor area, for it is very large and, when all is said and done, the boys were very small.
Another ten minutes went by before they came out on Vätkustvägen, where there were people, and even then they did not know what to do, for the people were in their cars, rushing along the road, cold and impersonal and purposeful, and no one could be bothered with two small boys standing waving on the pavement, especially as they had dark faces and were the usual “foreign rabble.”
The twenty-fifth car did not drive past, however, but stopped. A black-and-white Volkswagen with a radio aerial on the roof and the word POLICE in block letters on the side.
In this car sat two uniformed policemen named Elofsson and Borglund. They were feeling peaceable and kindly and neither of them understood a word of what the boys were saying. Elofsson thought he could make out that they were pointing toward the harbor basin and that one of them said something about “auto.” Then he offered them each a piece of candy, rolled the window up again, smiled and waved goodbye.
As Elofsson and Borglund were fairly conscientious policemen and also had nothing special to do, they drove in a wide circle through the eastern dock area. When they had got out to the farthest point and swung to the left along the parapet, they stopped the car and Borglund got out. He even got up onto the parapet and stood there for a few minutes. All he could see was the strange artificial marshland which the sand-excavators had created by their activities. He also heard a dog bark and a hissing noise from the oil refinery.
Twenty-four hours later, another policeman was standing on the edge of the dock in Industrihamnen. He was a police inspector and his name was Månsson. He did not see a car. He saw nothing but filthy water and an empty beer can and a limp contraceptive.
The rumor which had brought him there had come a long way around and had become considerably distorted. Two Yugoslavian boys were said to have seen a police car drive into the water and disappear here on Järnkajen. The boys were not yet of school age and did not speak Swedish. They had also pointed out quite different places on the wharf, and, naturally, there were no police cars missing.
Månsson was thoughtfully chewing a toothpick and listening absently to a dog barking somewhere in the vicinity. He was in his fifties, a large, heavily built man with a slow manner and a peaceable nature. He was thorough and walked slowly up and down the whole length of the wharf without finding anything special or unusual.
Månsson took the chewed toothpick out of his mouth and threw it into the water. It bobbed peacefully between the contraceptive and the beer can. He shrugged his shoulders and walked back toward his car.
He thought: Tomorrow I’ll get hold of a frogman.
20
When the frogman surfaced for the thirty-first time, he had found the car.
“Uhuh,” said Månsson.
He rolled the toothpick back and forth between his lips as he thought about what should be done.
Until this very moment, twenty-three minutes past two on the afternoon of the eighth of April, 1968, he had been as good as utterly certain that the car existed only in the imaginations of those two small boys.
Now the situation had changed.
“How is it placed?”
“Damned difficult to see anything down there,” said the frogman, “but as far as I could make out it’s standing with its rear toward the wharf, about fifteen yards out. Slightly at an angle, as if it had come along the parapet and had not had time to turn.”
Månsson nodded.
“There aren’t any warning notices,” said the frogman. He was not a policeman, and he was also young and inexperienced.
Månsson himself had taken part in the hauling out of the water of at least ten cars over the last twenty years. In each case, they had been empty and reported as stolen. No one had ever been taken to court, but there was reason to believe that the owners themselves had chosen this way of not only disposing of worn-out vehicles, but also of collecting the insurance money.
“Anything else to tell?”
“Well, as I said, you can’t see anything. It’s quite small and also full of mud and muck.”
The frogman paused.
“It’s certainly been there a long time,” he said.
“Oh well then, we’d better get it up,” said Månsson. “Is there any point in your going down again? Before we get hold of a winch, I mean?”
“Not really. I can’t do much until we start getting the hooks on.”
“Go and get something inside you, then,” said Månsson.
The beautiful weather seemed to have literally blown away. The sky was gray and it looked like rain, with low driving clouds, the wind blowing in from the northwest, cold and angry and blustery. The docks were back to normal, outside the parapet the sand-excavators and dredgers rattling and hooting, a little tug shuffling about in the harbor entrance, a diesel locomotive shunting a few freight cars, preceded by a man with a red flag, and three cargo boats, which had arrived the same morning, being unloaded. Some paid informer in the police force or the fire department had warned the press and ten or so reporters and photographers had already been standing freezing for hours on the wharf, or were sulkily huddled in their cars. The reporters and the frogman in their turn had attracted a number of the usual inquisitive people who were now tramping ba
ck and forth in the wind, their collars turned up and their hands thrust deeply into their pockets.
Månsson had not bothered to rope off the area or in any other way limit people’s freedom of movement. Now and again, one of the reporters came up to him and said: “Well?” Or something in that line. This happened again now. A man stepped out of one of the parked cars and indeed said:
“Well?”
“Well,” said Månsson slowly. “There’s a car down there. We’ll probably be getting it up in half an hour or so.”
He looked at the journalist, a man he had known for several years, winked and said:
“You can tell the others, can’t you? For we can’t stop it getting out, can we?”
“It’s empty, of course?” said the newspaper man.
“Well,” said Månsson, changing toothpicks. “As far as I know.”
“Insurance thing, as usual?”
“We’ll have to get it up and look first,” said Månsson, yawning. “And that won’t be for at least another half an hour, that’s certain. So you might as well scram and get something to eat.”
“See you,” said the journalist.
“Mmm,” said Månsson, and went over to his car.
He pushed his felt hat onto the back of his head and began fiddling with the radio. As he gave his instructions, he noticed a number of the pressmen had in fact taken his advice and driven away.
Elofsson and Borglund were also there. They were sitting 25 yards away in their Volkswagen, aching for coffee. A few minutes later, Elofsson came stumping over with his hands behind his back and said:
“What shall we say to people who ask what we’re up to?”
“Tell them we’re getting an old car out of the water,” said Månsson. “In half an hour’s time. You can go off and have some coffee in the meantime.”
“Thanks,” said Elofsson.
The little police car vanished at record speed. Both the policemen in front looked grave and determined, as if they were on an important and urgent mission. As soon as they were out of hearing, they would probably switch on their siren and flashing light, thought Månsson, chuckling to himself.
