The Fire Engine that Disappeared

by Maj Sjowall

  Almost an hour elapsed before everything was ready to haul the car out. Elofsson and Borglund, and the journalists had returned, and a number of dockers, seamen and people who worked for firms in the harbor area had joined the spectators. Altogether there were about 150 people around.

  “Well,” said Månsson, “let’s get going, shall we?”

  The operation was swift and undramatic. The chains creaked as they tightened and then the muddy water began to swirl around in a bubbling whirlpool and a metal roof came up to the surface.

  “Mind the winch, there,” said Månsson.

  And then the car came up, dripping with mud and dirty water. It was hanging a little crookedly in the hooks and Månsson studied it appraisingly as the photographers took as many pictures as possible. The car was small and old and more or less worthless. A Ford, an Anglia or a popular model, anyhow a type rarely seen now, but which had once been found in great numbers on the roads.

  The car appeared to be blue, but it was not easy to be more definite, as its surface was covered with a layer of grayish-green slime. The side windows were broken, or rolled down, and the whole car was full of mud and rubbish.

  “Let’s get it down, then,” said Månsson.

  People began to push around him and he said calmly:

  “Would you mind moving, please? So that we have room to put the wreck down.”

  The people moved away immediately, Månsson with them. The little car landed on the quay with a dismal rattle, mainly from the fenders and the front bumper, which had broken off at one end.

  The vehicle did indeed look dismal, and it was difficult to imagine that it had once rolled out of its factory in Dagenham, new and shiny, and that its first owner had once long ago sat at the wheel with his heart beating with excitement and swelling with pride.

  Elofsson was the first to go up to the car and look inside. The people watching him from behind saw him gradually stiffen and then quickly straighten up.

  Månsson followed him with slow steps, bent down, and peered through the open window of the right-hand door.

  Among the tipped-up seats with their rusty springs and blackened frames sat a muddy corpse. One of the most horrible he had ever seen. With empty eye-sockets and the lower jaw torn away.

  He straightened up and turned around.

  Elofsson had mechanically begun to push the nearest bystanders back.

  “Don’t push people,” said Månsson.

  Then he looked straight at the people nearest to him, one by one, and said in a loud calm voice:

  “There’s a dead man in the car. And he looks horrible.”

  Not a single person pushed forward to look.

  21

  Månsson did not think much of the police doctrine of keeping the general public out of their activities or of not allowing himself to be photographed “so long as this does not for some reason occur on the orders of the Chief of Police, or when it cannot be avoided,” as police regulations demanded. On the other hand, he found it easy to be natural even in unnatural situations, and as he had great respect for other people, people also respected him.

  Although neither he nor anyone else had given a thought to the matter, he had in fact done a very good job on the dock in Industrihamnen that Monday afternoon.

  If he had been in charge of the disturbances which had taken place during that long hot summer and which were generally regarded with great anxiety, then probably most of them would not have occurred. Instead, they were handled by people who thought that Rhodesia was somewhere near Tasmania and that it is illegal to burn the American flag, but positively praiseworthy to blow your nose on the Vietnamese. These people thought that water cannons, rubber billy clubs and slobbering German shepherd dogs were superior aids when it came to creating contact with human beings, and the results were according to those beliefs.

  But Månsson had other things to think about, namely, a drowned corpse.

  Corpses found in the water are never very pleasant, and this particular one was the least pleasant he had ever come across.

  Even the pathologist doing the autopsy said:

  “Phew! What a nasty bit of work.”

  Then he set to work while Månsson, in line of duty, stood watching in a corner. He was looking extremely thoughtful and the doctor, who was young and somewhat green, now and again glanced inquiringly at him.

  Månsson was certain that he was going to have trouble with the man from the car. He had suspected that something was seriously awry the moment the vehicle had risen out of the water. The solution that usually lay nearest to hand was this time out of the question from the start. It could not be an insurance swindle. Who would take the trouble to push a battered twenty-year-old wreck of a car into the harbor? And why?

  The logical answer to those questions was frighteningly simple and so he did not move a muscle when the pathologist said:

  “This friend of ours was dead before he went into the water.”

  After a while, Månsson said:

  “How long might he have been there?”

  “Hard to say,” said the doctor.

  He looked at the horrible swollen remains on the autopsy table and said:

  “Are there eels down there?”

  “Expect so.”

  “We-ell. Couple of months. At least two, perhaps four.”

  He poked about a bit with his probe and said:

  “It’s happened quite quickly. Not just the usual decomposition process. Presumably there are a lot of chemicals and other muck in the water.”

  Just before he left at the end of the day, Månsson asked one more question.

  “That business about eels, isn’t that just an old wives’ tale?”

  “The eel is a mysterious creature,” said the doctor.

  “Thanks,” said Månsson.

  The autopsy was completed the following day and made a very lugubrious story.

  The criminal investigation took considerably longer, but the conclusion was generally no less depressing.

  Not because nothing was found. In fact almost too much was found.

  On Monday, the twenty-second of April, Månsson knew a great deal, the following, for instance:

  The car was a Ford Prefect, 1951 model. It was blue and had been carelessly resprayed some time ago. It had false number plates, and the registration certificate, tax receipt and name plate were all missing. Its last two legal owners had been contacted through the registry of motor vehicles. A market gardener in Oxie had bought it secondhand but in relatively good condition as long ago as 1956 and then used it for eight years, after which he had sold it to one of his employees for 100 kronor. This man had used the car for three months. He said that it worked but looked so damned awful he had left it standing in a parking lot behind the indoor market in Drottningtorget. After a few weeks he had reported it as missing. He presumed that the police or the highway authorities had towed it away.

  Neither the police nor the highway authorities had any reports on it. So it must have been stolen. No one had seen it since.

  Of the vehicle’s last passenger, there was also quite a lot to say. A man in his early forties, 5 feet 9 inches, with ash-colored hair. He had not died by drowning, but from an injury to the back of his head. The implement used had left a hole in the skull. No bone splinters ran out from the edge of the injury, which pointed to the fact that the weapon which had caused the fracture was ball-shaped.

  Quite simply, the man had been killed outright.

  The weapon used was inside the car. A round stone, pushed down into a gentleman’s nylon crepe sock. The stone was about 4 inches in diameter and of a natural formation. A small granite rock, in fact. The sock was 10 inches from top to toe and had been made in France. It was also of good quality, of a well-known brand and had probably never been used for its original purpose.

  The dead man’s fingerprints were unobtainable. The outer skin of his fingers had loosened and the pupillary pattern only barely visible in the remaining skin.r />
  There was not a single object in the car that gave any indication of the dead man’s identity. Nor in his clothing, which was considered to be of second-rate quality and foreign manufacture; where from was uncertain. Neither was there anything which would help lead the inquiries about the murderer in any definite direction.

  People who knew something about a resprayed 1951 blue Prefect, not registered since 1964, had been asked to come forward. No one had done so. Quite naturally, actually, when one considered that the whole country was rapidly being converted into a vast graveyard for scrap cars, in which battered old retainers rested shrouded in the poisonous fumes of their successors.

  Månsson put the reports away, left his office and eventually the police station too. With his head down, he walked diagonally across Davidshallstorg toward the liquor store.

  He was thinking about his drowned corpse.

  Månsson was both a married man and a bachelor. He and his wife had begun to get on each other’s nerves ten years earlier, when their daughter had married a South American engineer and moved to Ecuador. He had got himself a bachelor apartment in Regementsgatan, near Fridhemstorget, and lived mostly there. But every Friday evening, he went home to his wife and stayed there until Monday morning. This was a wise procedure, thought Månsson. All irritation vanished and during the second half of the week, both of them nowadays looked forward with pleasure to their weekend marital existence.

  Månsson liked sitting in his sagging old armchair, taking a drink or two before going to bed. On this Monday evening, too. Monday evening was another of the week’s pinnacles. Not only was he tired of his old lady and knew that he would not have to see her until Friday, although he would be looking forward to seeing her by Thursday, but also he had not even had as much as a mild beer with his food during the last three days. Liquor was no longer available in his wife’s home.

  He mixed his third Gripenberger and thought about his drowned corpse.

  A Gripenberger consists of about one jigger of gin, a bottle of grape soda and crushed ice. A Finnish-Swedish cavalry officer, who was called Gripenberg, had taught him how to mix it in Villmanstrand, just after the war, when grape juice was still an exclusive drink, and he had stuck to it ever since.

  Månsson had been involved in many murder cases, but there was nothing within his experience that seemed to fit in with the dead man in the car. It was obvious that it was a question of deliberate murder. And also the murderer had used a weapon, as effective as it was simple, which was almost impossible to trace and not in the least sensational. Round stones could be found everywhere and the fact that someone was the owner of a French black sock was not likely to arouse anyone’s attention.

  The man in the car had been killed with a single blow. Then the murderer had packed the body into an old scrap car and pushed it into the water.

  As time went on, they would probably find the victim’s identity, but he had an uncomfortable feeling that this would not particularly worry the murderer.

  The case appeared to be unpleasantly difficult to solve. Månsson had a feeling that it would be a long time before it was cleared up. If ever.

  22

  Doris Mårtensson arrived back home on the evening of Saturday the twentieth of April.

  It was now eight o’clock on Monday morning and she was standing in front of her large mirror in her bedroom, admiring her suntan and thinking how envious her friends at work would be. She had an ugly love-bite on her right thigh and two on her left breast. As she fastened her bra, she thought that perhaps it would be necessary to keep things on for the coming week to avoid awkward questions and involved explanations.

  The doorbell rang. She pulled her dress over her head, thrust her feet into her slippers and went to open the door. The doorway was filled by a gigantic blond man in a tweed suit and a short open sports coat.

  He stared at her with his china-blue eyes and said:

  “What was Greece like?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Don’t you know that the military junta there allows tens of thousands of people to rot away in political prisons and that people are tortured to death every day? That they hang women from the ceiling on iron hooks and burn off their nipples with electric steel cutters?”

  “You don’t think about things like that when the sun’s out and everyone’s dancing and happy.”

  “Happy?”

  She looked appraisingly at him and thought that her suntan must look fine against her white dress. This is a real man, she could see that at once. Big and strong and blunt. Perhaps a little brutal too; nice.

  “Who are you?” she said, with interest.

  “Police. My name’s Larsson. At ten past eleven on the evening of the seventh of March this year, you received a false alarm over the telephone. Do you remember it?”

  “Oh, yes. We very seldom get false alarms. Ringvägen in Sundbyberg.”

  “Good. What did the person say?”

  “There’s a house on fire at 37 Ringvägen. Ground floor.”

  “Was it a man or a woman?”

  “A guy.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “No, just that.”

  “Are you certain about the actual words?”

  “Yes, as good as.”

  He took a few loose bits of paper and a ballpoint pen out of his pocket and noted something down.

  “Did you notice anything else?”

  “Oh, yes. Lots of things.”

  The man seemed surprised, frowned and stared greedily straight at her with his blue eyes. There was something about Swedish men after all. Pity about those marks. But perhaps he was one of the unprejudiced ones.

  “Oh, yes, indeed. What were they?”

  “First of all, he was calling from a public telephone. I heard it clicking in the coin-box before the call was put through. He was probably calling from a call-box in Sundbyberg.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Well, you see, because the old kind of notices are still in some of the booths there, with a line direct to us. Otherwise they’re trying to get everyone to ring the emergency number now. To Central Alarm in Greater Stockholm, you see.”

  The man nodded and wrote on his bit of paper.

  “But I repeated the address and then I said: ‘Here in town? In Sundbyberg, I mean?’ Then I was going to ask him what his name was and all that.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “No. He just said ‘Yes’ and put down the receiver. It sounded as if he was in a hurry. But people who call and say there’s a fire are usually upset and nervous.”

  “So he interrupted you?”

  “Yes. I don’t think I even got the word Sundbyberg out.”

  “No?”

  “Well, I said it. But he interrupted me in the middle and said ‘Yes’ and put back the receiver. So I don’t expect he even heard it.”

  “Did you know there was a fire at the same address in Stockholm at the same time?”

  “No. There was a big fire in Stockholm at that time. I got a message about it from Central Alarm about ten or twelve minutes later. But that was in Sköldgatan.”

  She looked piercingly at him and said:

  “Say, aren’t you the guy who saved all those people out of that burning house?”

  He did not reply and after a pause, she said:

  “Yes, it was you. I recognize you from the pictures. But I didn’t imagine you were so big.”

  “You’ve obviously got a good memory.”

  “As soon as I found out that it was a false alarm, I tried to remember that conversation. The police usually want to know about it afterward. The police out here, I mean. But this time they didn’t inquire.”

  The man scowled. It suited him. She thrust her right hip forward a little and at the same time bent her knee so that the heel came up from the floor. She had good legs, and now they were sunburned as well.

  “What else do you remember? About the man?”

  “He wasn�
��t Swedish.”

  “A foreigner?”

  He frowned even more heavily and stared sharply at her. Blast that she’d put on her slippers. She had good feet, she knew that. And feet can be good.

  “Yes,” she said. “He had an accent, quite a strong one.”

  “What accent was it?”

  “He wasn’t a German or a Finn,” she said. “And naturally not a Norwegian or a Dane.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I recognize Finns and I was … engaged to a German boy for a while.”

  “Would you say he spoke bad Swedish?”

  “No, not at all. I understood what he said, and he talked fluently and very quickly.”

  She frowned and thought back. She must look quite interesting now.

  “He wasn’t a Spaniard either. And not an Englishman.”

  “American?” suggested the man.

  “Certainly not.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “I know a lot of foreigners here in Stockholm,” she said. “And I go south for my holidays at least twice a year. Anyhow, Englishmen and Americans never learn to speak Swedish. Perhaps he was a Frenchman. Possibly Italian. Perhaps a Frenchman, as I said.”

  “But that’s a guess, isn’t it?”

  “We-ell, he said howze, for instance.”

  “Howze?”

  “Yes, or rather owze, for house. I hardly heard the h.”

  He looked at his notes and said:

  “Shall we take it word for word. First he said: ‘There’s a fire in the house at 37 Ringvägen’?”

  “No, he said: ‘There’s a fire at the house at 37 Ringvägen, ground floor.’ And he said owze and zeven. It sounded like a French accent to me …”

  “Were you engaged to a French boy too?”

  “Well, I know a few.… I’ve several French friends.”

  “How did he say ‘yes’?”

  “With an open e, like someone from Skåne.”

  “We’ll be getting in touch with you again,” he said. “You’re the greatest.”