The Department of Sensitive Crimes

by Alexander McCall Smith

  That evening there was an article in Nordic Art that he had been looking forward to reading. This was a prolonged reflection by a prominent art critic of a painting that Ulf had seen on a visit the previous year to Norrköping. The Vargs, his family on his paternal side, originally came from Östergötland, and there were still family occasions—weddings, baptisms, funerals—amongst a large tribe of cousins, to which Ulf would occasionally have to travel. On his last visit, made for the seventy-fifth birthday of a senior Varg aunt, Ulf had been able to pay a quick visit to the Norrköpings Konstmuseum, the local art museum, and had found himself standing in front of Det sjungande trädet, The Singing Tree, a large painting by Isaac Grünewald. This painting, which a small informative label told him was painted in 1915, was Chagall-like in its colours and dreamy, flowing quality. An autumnally leafed tree, predominantly red, curled its trunk up the central section of the painting. Behind it, in public gardens, a carousel was filled with children, watched, to judge by their clothing, by two sailors. Farther in the background, but still in the gardens, a striped tent-roof sheltered a throng of people, talking, or dining, or simply thronging. Now this picture was being subjected to the gaze of an art historian, and was featured, in full and vibrant colour, above the article in Nordic Art.

  The painting had made an impression on Ulf, and he was pleased to see it again. He started reading: this picture, wrote the critic, is all about the incorporation of nature, represented here by the tree, within our growing urban environment. The tree still celebrates its essential treeness through song, as nature will do whatever we impose on her. Birds still sing their ancient songs in the middle of a bustling city, with all its cacophony of man-made sounds. Dry leaves still rustle like dice even when growing against concrete or hewn stone. Out of a tiny crack in a pavement will crawl a perfectly formed insect, a creature of curves and protrusions amidst a linear world of man’s engineering.

  Ulf’s eye wandered from the text to the reproduction of the painting. In the foreground, more important than any of the other figures on the canvas, was a woman holding the hand of a small child. The child, a boy in a striped shirt, was about half the size of the woman. He tugged at her arm as if wanting to go off to the right-hand corner of the painting; she, sheltering under a blue parasol, seemed to be intent on staying where she was. She was co-operating with the painter, standing still, while the child had more pressing business elsewhere. It was a small detail, but it interested Ulf because he had not seen it before. He had viewed the figures as just being there coincidentally, rather than being there to say something about the tree. And now it occurred to him that the child complemented the tree. The tree had its own song—so did the child. The adult represented the world that had entrapped the tree—taken it out of the forest, so to speak, out of nature, and placed it in an urban environment. The child would be taken out of the world of childhood—a world in which trees might well be expected to sing—and put in the serious, non-singing world of adulthood.

  Then the thought occurred to him: What if the child were not a child, but a small man? What if these figures represented a woman who lived with a midget, a husband or lover who was much shorter than she—half her height? It was perfectly possible. Tall people took up with small people, and sometimes the disparity in height could be considerable. He looked at the painting again, and told himself that this interpretation was clearly fanciful: the small figure was definitely a boy. But then he stopped. He stood up, dropping Nordic Art to the floor. Under the kitchen table, Martin opened an eye, not because he had heard the sound of the magazine hitting the floor—he could not—but because he had been observing Ulf from under not-quite-shut eyelids, watching his mouth for any sign of the lip position for walkies or biscuits.

  Ulf reached for his telephone and dialled Anna’s number. She was making dinner at home, steaming the organic broccoli she had bought in the market; she would serve this with cod and potatoes to her husband, the girls having eaten earlier, to allow them to attend practice at the swimming club. She was used to getting office calls at all hours, and so was not surprised when she received Ulf’s request for Blomquist’s mobile number. She had made a note of this at the beginning of their visit to the market, and gave it to him now.

  “He’ll be pleased to hear from you,” she said, holding the phone with one hand and with the other lifting the lid of the vegetable steamer. “He’s very keen to be involved in this investigation.”

  “He might be able to help us,” said Ulf. “I won’t take any more of your time just now, but I might have something to talk about tomorrow.”

  Anna was curious. “A suspect?”

  “Maybe. It depends. At the moment it’s just a supposition.”

  Anna said that she had also been thinking about the case. “It’s nothing to do with the dairy farm,” she said. “It’s not them.”

  “No,” agreed Ulf. “I think they’re in the clear.”

  “So that leaves the bikers. I think this has all the hallmarks of a crime of passion. You only stab somebody in the back of the knee if you’re feeling very sore about something. You don’t want to kill your victim, you want him to feel pain. You’re effectively saying, You’ve caused me pain, and now I’m doing the same thing to you.”

  Ulf hesitated. The silence between them was being transmitted through the air, from communication tower to communication tower. Silence. Then he said, “Possibly.”

  They rang off, and he dialled Blomquist’s number. “Blomquist,” he said. “Did you see any really small people in the market that day? Not just short, but really short?”

  Blomquist coughed. “Sorry,” he said. “My chest. I’ve had this cough that’s been with me for two weeks now. Stubborn. I have this codeine syrup stuff that makes me feel vaguely drowsy. I don’t like taking it—and I don’t think it works all that well.”

  “I hate having a tickle in my throat,” said Ulf.

  “A dry cough,” said Blomquist. “Yes, those are the worst. I like the expression a productive cough. You bring up the phlegm. Much better that way, I think. Lots of phlegm.”

  “That helps,” said Ulf. He waited a few moments to see if Blomquist had finished. A productive telephone call, he thought. Brings up the facts. Lots of facts.

  “Yes,” said Blomquist at last. “There was somebody.”

  “Known to you?”

  Ulf waited. On this answer, he thought, hangs the fate of this investigation.

  “Yes,” said Blomquist.

  * * *

  —

  Anna looked at Ulf in astonishment. “A dance studio?” she asked. “Did I hear you correctly? Dance?”

  They had met, quite by chance, in the café opposite the office. Ulf rarely went in there before mid-morning, but Anna was a regular on what she called the “early caffeine shift.” She liked to buy a large cup of coffee that she would nurse for a few minutes, scanning the morning’s newspaper headlines, before making her way into the office. On this particular morning, she was surprised to see Ulf, and even more surprised by his mention of a visit he proposed they should make later that day.

  “I spoke to Blomquist last night,” he said. “He went on and on about a cough he’s been suffering from. You know what he’s like.”

  “I barely know him,” she said. “I remember him from that whisky case, but you had more to do with him than I did.” She paused, and took a sip of her steaming coffee. “You say he has a cough?”

  “Yes,” said Ulf. “He told me he’d had it for two weeks.”

  “That’s hardly persistent.”

  “No. I would have thought a two-week cough was hardly worth mentioning.”

  Anna took another sip of her coffee. “I spoke to somebody who’s been coughing for four months. She told me that the doctor has given her one of those steroid inhalers. It’s meant to calm the airways.”

  Ulf nodded. “But you don’t wan
t to use too many steroids.”

  “No,” said Anna. “But if you carry on coughing, what can you do?”

  Ulf raised the issue of athletes. “If you’re a cyclist, for instance, and you have to have one of those inhalers, surely you could get into trouble with the anti-doping people? Like that American? What was his name? The man who had his Tour de France win taken away from him.”

  Anna had only a vague recollection of the affair. “I suppose I’ll have to talk to the girls about doping one of these days. If they start getting into these big competitions with their swimming, I imagine they’ll have to be careful about what they take—for coughs, and things like that, of course.” She paused. “Two weeks is nothing. Some of these infections last for ages.”

  Ulf nodded. “I cut a finger on an oyster shell once,” he said. “I was shucking some oysters...”

  “I love oysters,” said Anna.

  “Do you eat them raw?”

  She did not mind: either raw or cooked.

  “Anyway, I cut my finger on the shell. You know how difficult it is to get them out of their shells? Well, I was being careful and I still managed it. The cut wasn’t very big at all, but it wouldn’t heal. It became infected and they had to try several antibiotics before it got better. They were quite worried, I think.”

  “The doctors?”

  “Yes. They were worried. They told me they had only a limited number of antibiotics at their disposal—what with resistance—and when they didn’t work it was always an anxious moment.”

  Anna sighed. “We depend on antibiotics, don’t we? We take them for granted, but they’re a very hard-pressed defence line. Jo worries about that, you know.” Jo was her anaesthetist husband, a mild, rather oppressed-looking man—just the sort to worry about antibiotics, thought Ulf.

  Then Anna asked, “So Blomquist had some information?”

  Ulf told her of his conversation with Blomquist and the response he had received to his question about small people at the market. “I had an idea, you see, that the person who stabbed Malte was very small.”

  “Because of that small split in the canvas?”

  “Yes, but also because of the site of the injury.” Ulf waited. He was not sure how his supposition would be received.

  “Down low?”

  “Precisely. If you are small—very small—and you reach out to stab somebody, then the injury will be on a lower part of the body, won’t it?”

  Ulf watched Anna as she considered this. He valued intelligence, and Anna was a highly intelligent woman. But as well as valuing her opinion, he was worried about her pouring cold water on his ideas. What if she were to laugh? What if she were to say that this was absurd, and that linking the site of injury to the height of the assailant was just too unsophisticated?

  She did not laugh. Instead she nodded gravely. “It’s possible,” she said. “Just possible, I suppose.”

  Ulf’s relief showed. “Blomquist replied almost immediately,” he said. “He said: ‘Oh, there was Hampus, of course. I saw him there. He works nearby and you often see him.’ ”

  Anna put down her cardboard cup. “These things get too hot,” she said. “They make them too thin these days.”

  “Or the coffee’s made too hot,” said Ulf.

  “That too. But who’s this Hampus?”

  Ulf smiled. “Well, this is the interesting bit. Apparently, Hampus runs a dance studio—one of these places where you go to learn the waltz.”

  “And the cha-cha? And the quickstep?”

  “Yes, all of that stuff.” Ulf did not like dancing.

  “I used to go to one of those places,” said Anna. “When I was seventeen. I thought I might become one of those professional dancers. You know the type—they wear all those sequins and they whirl around.”

  “We all have our dreams,” said Ulf. “And you ended up as a detective.”

  “A better career. Much better. I don’t think those dancers have much of a life. Constant practice. Forever watching your weight so that your bottom doesn’t look too big.”

  Ulf lowered his eyes.

  Anna was looking at him. “That made you think of Saga,” she said accusingly. “Go on, admit it.”

  He looked up, and smiled. “I suppose so.”

  Saga was a colleague who specialised in financial crime. She had a problem with weight distribution.

  “I don’t know how she fits in her chair,” said Anna. “But I don’t suppose I should think about that sort of thing. We’re not meant to, are we? We’re meant to ignore people’s bottoms.”

  Ulf shrugged. How could one ignore something so fundamental? “This Hampus,” he said. “He’s very small, Blomquist said. He’s a midget.”

  Anna raised an eyebrow. “A midget? Do we use that word?”

  Ulf said that he was not sure. “Perhaps it’s safer to call him a very small person. I wouldn’t want to use a derogatory term.”

  “Probably safer,” said Anna. “If you use the wrong word in a report, you get your knuckles rapped. So he’s not a dwarf, then?”

  “Not as far as I know,” said Ulf. “I asked Blomquist, who said that he thought a dwarf didn’t have normal bodily proportions. Midgets—I mean, small people—do. They have small bodies, but otherwise they look normal.”

  Anna frowned. “I’m not sure that you can say normal, you know. Perhaps say average. Nobody gets offended if you say that they’re not average.”

  They were both silent for a while. Anna took another sip of her coffee; Ulf looked out of the window. A man was walking past with his hat pulled down over his eyes and the collar of his coat turned up. As he drew level with the café, he glanced in and made eye contact with Ulf. They both looked away.

  “I have to say,” Ulf continued, “that I found the thought a little strange. Here’s this very small person running a dance studio. Blomquist says that he dances with his customers. That’s what he said.”

  “Not surprising,” said Anna. “The owners of these places are usually dance instructors.”

  “Yes, but can you picture it? What if the customer is...is normal—I mean is average height? Wouldn’t it be a bit difficult for Hampus to dance with a person who’s much taller? How could he put his hands round her shoulders?”

  Anna shook her head. “It can’t be easy.”

  “No,” said Ulf. “But that’s not for us to speculate about. The real question is this: Could Hampus be the very short person who stabbed Malte in the back of the knee? That’s the question, I’d say.”

  “I’d say that too,” agreed Anna. She looked at her watch. “We’d better get over to the office; Carl will have been there for hours already.”

  Ulf prepared to leave. “I saw Carl’s father on television last night.”

  Anna thought of Ulf, alone in his flat, watching a television programme about moral dilemmas.

  “He was talking about the ethics of criticising other people’s lifestyle decisions.”

  Anna picked up her half-finished cup of coffee. “Such as?”

  “Oh, vegans telling schools they shouldn’t keep animals in the classroom. You know, guinea pigs, hamsters, and so on. Schools sometimes have them in the classroom.”

  “Yes,” said Anna. “The girls did, when they were smaller. Mind you, the kids aren’t going to eat these creatures. So what’s the vegans’ beef?”

  Ulf smiled. “Apparently, they argue that this inculcates ideas of animal husbandry in the children’s minds.”

  “Oh, really!” Anna exploded. “Where’s their sense of proportion?”

  Ulf did not answer. He was wondering whether there was anybody who would object to his keeping Martin? And if so, what would they say he should do with the dog? Let him go free?

  But Anna had more to say about classroom pets. “The girls’ school had a guinea pig called Walte
r. The kids took turns to take it home at weekends. Until somebody’s dog ate it one weekend.”

  Ulf whistled. “Disaster.”

  “Yes. But what was Carl’s father’s view?”

  “He said it depends,” said Ulf. “But he said it in that fantastic voice of his. And everybody in the studio audience started to nod. He only has to open his mouth, and people start to nod. It’s amazing.”

  They left the café and crossed the road to the front door of the office. Erik was arriving for work just ahead of them, and he nodded a greeting. Ulf noticed a magazine rolled up under his arm: it would be one of Erik’s angling magazines, with its pictures of reels and floats and all the paraphernalia of fishing; the things that made life bearable for him, his props. He thought about Professor Holgersson, and what he might say about such a life. Or what Kierkegaard might say, for that matter. They would approve, he suspected, because it was an honest, authentic life, lived with integrity and without pretence, which was more than could be said of so many more sophisticated lives.

  “Poor Erik,” muttered Anna.

  “No,” said Ulf. “No. Not poor Erik—fortunate Erik.”

  Anna gave Ulf a dubious look. “But all he thinks of...”

  “...is fishing. Yes, but does that make him unhappy? Quite the contrary: Erik is utterly happy. Erik is completely resolved.”

  Anna looked thoughtful. “What do you think Erik thinks of us?”

  “I have no idea,” said Ulf.

  “He admires you,” said Anna. “He’s told me so on more than one occasion. He says you’re kind.”

  “That’s generous of him. Of course, he’s the kind one.” Ulf paused. “I know he likes you.”

  Anna remembered that she had had an invitation from Erik to join him and his wife for ice fishing one winter. She’d had to think quickly to come up with an excuse.

  “Ice fishing is extremely dull,” said Ulf. “You sit there round a hole in the ice and wait for fish to bite.”

  “I know,” said Anna. “Poor Erik.”