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‘It was just a stupid question.’
For the second time since they met, the other man looked completely serious. And a little hurt.
‘That's not true. I know it's not true. And I think I know why you asked.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you think I don't understand women?’
Martin Beck put down the photographs. Since meeting Rhea, he found he had much less trouble being honest.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You're right.’
‘Good,’ said Allwright, lighting a new cigarette absent-mindedly. ‘Good enough. Thanks. You may very well be right. I'm a man who's had no women in his private life. Outside of my mother, of course, and the fishergirl from Abbekås. And I've always regarded women as regular people, essentially no different from me and men in general. So if there are any subtle differences, then it's possible they've passed me by. Since I know I'm ignorant on the subject, I've read a number of books and articles and things on women's lib, but most of it is nonsense. And the part that isn't nonsense is so obvious a Hottentot could understand it. Equal pay for equal work, for example, and sex discrimination.’
‘Why a Hottentot?’
Allwright laughed so loud the dog jumped up and started licking his face.
‘There was a guy on the town council who claimed the Hottentots were the only culture that in two thousand years never managed to invent the wheel. Bullshit, of course. I hardly have to tell you which party he represented.’
Martin Beck didn't want to know. Nor did he want to know what political persuasion Allwright represented. Whenever people started talking politics he always went as silent as a clam.
And he was still sitting there in clamlike silence when, thirty seconds later, the phone rang.
Allwright picked up the receiver.
‘Allwright?’ he said.
Whoever it was apparently made some amusing remark.
‘Yes, I am, sort of.’
And then, with a certain hesitation:
‘Yes, he's sitting right here.’
Martin Beck took the receiver.
‘Beck.’
‘Hi, this is Ragnarsson. We've made about a hundred calls trying to locate you. What's up?’
One of the drawbacks of being chief of the National Murder Squad was that the large newspapers had people who kept an eye on where you went and why. In order to do that, they needed paid informers inside the police department, which was irritating, but couldn't be helped. The National Police Commissioner was especially irritated, but he was also scared to death that it would get out. Nothing was ever supposed to get out.
Ragnarsson was a newspaperman, one of the better and more decent ones, which by no means meant that his paper was one of the better and more decent papers.
‘Are you still there?’ Ragnarsson said.
‘Someone has disappeared,’ said Martin Beck.
‘Disappeared? People disappear every day, and they don't call you in. What's more, I heard Kollberg is on his way down there. There's something fishy about all this.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
‘We're sending down a couple of men. You might as well be prepared. That's all I wanted to tell you. I didn't want to do anything behind your back, you know that. You can trust me. So long.’
‘So long.’
Martin Beck rubbed the edge of his scalp. He trusted Ragnarsson, but not his reporters, and least of all his newspaper.
Allwright was looking thoughtful.
‘Journalist?’
‘Yes.’
‘From Stockholm?’
‘Yes.’
‘That blows it wide open then.’
‘Definitely.’
‘We've got local correspondents here too. They know all about it. But they're obliging. A kind of loyalty. The Trelleborgs Allehanda is fine. But then there are the Malmö papers. Kvällsposten, that's the worst. And now we'll have Aftonbladet and Expressen.’
‘Yes, I'm afraid so.’
‘Balls!’
Balls was a mild, everyday expression in Skåne.
Further north, it sounded very bad.
Maybe Allwright didn't know that. Or maybe he didn't care.
Martin Beck liked Allwright very much.
A sort of obvious, natural friendship. Things were going to work out fine.
‘What do we do now?’
‘Up to you,’ said Martin Beck. ‘You're the expert.’
‘Anderslöv district. Yes, I ought to be. Shall I give you an orientation? By car? But let's not take the patrol car. Mine's better.’
‘The tomato-coloured one?’
‘Right. Everyone knows it, of course. But I feel more comfortable in it. Shall we go?’
‘Whatever you say.’
They talked about three things in the car.
The first was something Allwright hadn't mentioned before, for some reason.
‘There's the post office over there, and now we're coming to the bus stop. The last time Sigbrit was seen she was standing right about here.’
He slowed down and stopped.
‘We've got a witness who saw something else too.’
‘What?’
‘Folke Bengtsson. He came driving along in his estate car, and when he passed Sigbrit he slowed down and stopped. Seems natural enough. He'd picked up his car and was headed home. They knew each other, lived next door. He knows she's waiting for the bus, and he gives her a lift.’
‘What sort of a witness?’
Allwright drummed his fingers on the wheel.
‘An older woman from town here. Her name is Signe Persson. When she heard Sigbrit had disappeared, she came in and told us she'd been walking down the other side of the street and noticed Sigbrit, and just then Bengtsson drove up from the other direction. He put on his brakes and stopped. Now it happens Britta was alone at the station when she came in, so she told her she ought to come back and talk to me. And she came back the next day, and I talked to her. She told me pretty much the same story. That she'd seen Sigbrit and that Folke stopped his car. So then I asked her if she had actually seen the car stop and Sigbrit get into it.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She said she didn't want to turn around and look because she didn't want to seem nosy. Which is a silly answer, since this old lady is probably the nosiest woman in the county. But when I coaxed her a little she did say she turned her head soon afterwards, and neither Sigbrit nor the car were anywhere to be seen. So we chatted a little about one thing and another, and after a while she said she wasn't sure. Said she didn't want to talk about people behind their backs. But then the next day she ran into one of my men at the Co-op and stated definitely that she'd seen Bengtsson stop and that Sigbrit got into the car. If she sticks to that, then Folke Bengtsson is definitely linked to the disappearance.’
‘What does Bengtsson say?’
‘Don't know. I haven't talked to him. Two detectives from Trelleborg were out there, but he wasn't at home. Then they decided to call you in and more or less ordered me not to do anything. Didn't want me to anticipate events, as it were. Bide my time and wait for the experts. I haven't even written up a report about my talk with Signe Persson. Do you think that sounds slipshod?’
Martin Beck didn't answer.
‘I think it's pretty slipshod,’ said Allwright with a little laugh. ‘But I'm a little wary of Signe Persson. She was mixed up in the worst case I ever had. Must be five years ago. She claimed a neighbour had poisoned her cat. Made a formal complaint, so we had to investigate. Then the other old lady made a complaint against Signe Persson, because the cat had killed her budgie. We dug up the cat and sent it to Helsingborg. They couldn't find any poison. So then Signe claimed the other woman had bought two cigars at the tobacconist's and boiled them. She'd read in some magazine that if you boil cigars long enough you get nicotine crystals, which are deadly poisonous and don't leave any trace. The neighbour actually had bought two cigars, but she said they were just to offer guests and her brother had smoked them. I asked her how the cat had managed to kill the budgie, since it was always in its cage. And she claimed Signe got the damned cat to scare the budgie to death, because the bird could talk and had uttered some dreadful truths. Signe said it was quite true that the budgie had called her a whore on no fewer than five occasions. There was a police cadet here at the time who was a real go-getter, and he investigated this theory about the cigars and decided it was theoretically possible, and that if the victim was a habitual smoker then poisoning couldn't be proved. So when Signe Persson came in for the tenth or twelfth time I asked her if her cat had been a heavy smoker. After that she wouldn't even say hello to me for several years. We closed the case, and the cadet stayed home boiling cigars until they gave him the sack. Then he settled down in Eslöv and became an inventor.’
‘What did he invent?’
‘The only thing I heard about was that he applied for a patent for a potty with a luminous rim and for a nicotine detector that meowed if you dipped it in poisoned cabbage soup. That didn't work out, so he tried to rebuild it into a mechanical cat that ran on batteries.’
Allwright looked at his watch.
‘So that was point of interest number one. The bus stop. Plus the story of our witness Signe Persson and of a man who had his life ruined by a cigar-smoking cat. I must say, the thought of a case where Signe figures as the key witness does not make me happy. We'd better move on. The bus will be here pretty soon.’
He put the car in gear and looked in the rear-view mirror.
‘We've got someone behind us,’ he said. ‘A green Fiat with two men in it. They've been sitting back there ever since we stopped. Shall we show them around a little?’
‘Okay by me.’
‘Interesting to be shadowed,’ Allwright said. ‘New experience for me.’
He was driving at less than twenty miles an hour, but the other car made no attempt to pass.
‘Those buildings up there to the right, that's Domme. That's where Sigbrit Mård and Folke Bengtsson live. Do you want to drive up?’
‘Not right now. Has anyone done a proper crime lab job up there?’
‘At Sigbrit's? No, I can't say we have. We were there and had a look around, and I took that picture off the wall above her bed. And I suppose we left some fingerprints here and there.’
‘If she were dead …’
Martin Beck stopped himself. It was a fairly stupid question.
‘And if I had killed her, what would I do with the body? I've thought about that myself. But there are just too many possibilities. Lots of marl pits and tumbledown old houses. And shacks and sheds. A long coastline on the Baltic, empty summer cottages. Woods and acres of storm debris and thickets and ditches and every other damned thing.’
‘Woods?’
‘Yes, up by Börringe Lake. The police used to have a pistol match up there every year in a clearing on the east shore. Since the storm in sixty-eight, it's such a mess up there you couldn't get in with a tank. It'll take a hundred years to get rid of the debris. Besides…By the way, there's a map in the glove compartment.’
Martin Beck took out the map and unfolded it.
‘We're in Alstad now, on Route 101 heading for Malmö. You can get your bearings from that.’
‘Are you planning to drive this slowly all the way?’
‘No. Jesus! Pure absentmindedness. Just wanted to be sure we didn't lose those hotshots behind us.’
Allwright swung off to the right. The green car followed.
‘Now we've left the Anderslöv police district,’ he said. ‘But we'll be right back in it.’
‘What were you going to say a minute ago? Besides…what?’
‘Oh yes. Besides, it's the general belief that Sigbrit Mård was picked up by someone in a car. There's even a witness who says so. If you look at the map you'll see there are three major roads through the district. The old Main Road, which we just left; Route 10, which follows the coast from Trelleborg to Ystad and then goes on all the way to Simrishamn, and, in addition, a section of the new European Route 14, which connects with the ferry from Poland in Ystad and then runs on through Malmö and God knows where all. And on top of that we've got a network of back roads that probably doesn't have its equal anywhere else in the country.’
‘So I see,’ said Martin Beck.
True to form, he was beginning to get carsick.
It did not, however, prevent him from studying the landscape they were travelling through. He had never been in this part of the country before and didn't know much more about it than what he remembered from old Edvard Persson movies. The plains of Skåne have a soft, rolling beauty. This was more than a populous rural idyll, it was a singular piece of countryside with a kind of inherent harmony.
He suddenly remembered a disconnected sentence from the general chorus of complaints about conditions in the country. ‘Sweden's a rotten country, but it's a very pretty rotten country.’ Someone had said that or written it, but he couldn't remember who.
Allwright went on talking.
‘The Anderslöv district is a bit unusual. When we're not pushing paper, we're mostly concerned with traffic. For example, we put fifty thousand miles a year on the patrol car. We've got about a thousand people in town and maybe ten thousand in the whole district. But we've got over fifteen miles of beach, and in the summer the population grows to over thirty thousand. So you can imagine how many buildings are standing empty at this time of year. Now so far I'm talking about people we know, and pretty much know where we can find them. But I'd estimate there's another five to six thousand people we don't have any check on at all, people who live in old houses or caravans and then move away and other people take their place.’
Martin Beck turned to look at an unusually pretty whitewashed church. Allwright followed his gaze.
