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The pistol was an ordinary 7.6 millimetre Walther, licensed in Sweden. It was useless in most situations and he was a pretty poor shot anyway.
He went out into the hall, put on his trenchcoat, and stood with his dark hat in his hands.
‘Aren't you going to say goodbye to Rolf and the Little One?’
‘It's ridiculous to call a twelve-year-old girl “Little One”.’
‘I think it's sweet.’
‘It's a shame to wake them. And anyway, they know that I am going.’
He put his hat on.
‘So long. I'll call you.’
‘Bye bye, and be careful.’
He stood on the platform and waited for the subway and thought that he really didn't mind leaving home in spite of the half-finished planking on the model of the training ship Danmark.
Martin Beck wasn't chief of the Homicide Squad and had no such ambitions. Sometimes he doubted if he would ever make superintendent although the only things that could actually stand in his way were death or some very serious error in his duties. He was a First Detective Inspector with the National Police and had been with the Homicide Bureau for eight years. There were people who thought that he was the country's most capable examining officer.
He had been on the police force half of his life. At the age of twenty-one he had begun at Jakob Police Station and after six years as a patrol officer in different districts in central Stockholm he was sent to the National Police College. He was one of the best in his class and when the course was finished he was appointed a Detective Inspector. He was twenty-eight years old at the time.
His father had died that year and he moved from his furnished room in the middle of the city back to the family home in southern Stockholm to take care of his mother. That summer he met his wife. She had rented a cottage with a friend out in the archipelago where he happened to be with his sailing canoe. He fell very much in love. Then, in the autumn, when they were expecting a child, they got married at City Hall and moved to her small apartment back in the city.
One year after the birth of their daughter, there wasn't much left of the happy and lively girl he had fallen in love with and their marriage had slipped into a fairly dull routine.
Martin Beck sat on the green bench in the subway car and looked out through the rain-blurred window. He thought about his marriage apathetically, but when he realized that he was sitting there feeling sorry for himself, he took his newspaper out of his trenchcoat pocket and tried to concentrate on the editorial page.
He looked tired and his sunburned skin seemed yellowish in the grey light. His face was lean with a broad forehead and a strong jaw. His mouth, under his short, straight nose, was thin and wide with two deep lines near the corners. When he smiled, you could see his healthy, white teeth. His dark hair was combed straight back from the even hairline and had not yet begun to grey. The look in his soft blue eyes was clear and calm. He was thin but not especially tall and somewhat round-shouldered. Some women would say he was good looking but most of them would see him as quite ordinary. He dressed in a way that would draw no attention. If anything, his clothes were a little too discreet.
The air in the train was close and stuffy and he felt slightly uncomfortable as he usually did when he was on the subway. When they arrived at Central Station, he was the first one at the door with his suitcase in his hand.
He disliked the subway. But since he cared even less for bumper-to-bumper traffic, and that ‘dream apartment’ in the centre of the city was still only a dream, he had no choice at the moment.
The express to Gothenburg left the station at 7.30 a.m. Martin Beck thumbed through his newspaper but didn't see a line about the murder. He turned back to the cultural pages and began to read an article on the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner but fell asleep in a few minutes.
He awoke in good time to change trains at Hallsberg. The lead taste in his mouth had come back and stayed with him despite the three glasses of water that he drank.
He arrived in Motala at 10.30 a.m. and by then the rain had stopped. Since it was his first visit there, he asked at the kiosk in the station the way to the City Hotel and bought a pack of cigarettes and the Motala newspaper.
The hotel was on the main square only a few blocks from the railway station. The short walk stimulated him. Up in his room he washed his hands, unpacked, and drank a bottle of mineral water which he got from the porter. He stood by the window for a moment and looked out over the square. It had a statue in the centre which he guessed was of Baltzar von Platen. Then he left the room to go to the police station. Since he knew it was right across the street, he left his trenchcoat in the room.
He told the officer on duty who he was and was immediately shown to an office on the second floor. The name Ahlberg was on the door.
The man sitting behind the desk was broad and thick-set and slightly bald. His jacket was on the back of his chair and he was drinking coffee out of a container. A cigarette was burning on the corner of an ash tray which was already filled with butts.
Martin Beck had a way of slinking through a door which irritated a number of people. Someone once said that he was able to slip into a room and close the door behind him so quickly that it seemed as if he were still knocking on the outside.
The man behind the desk seemed slightly surprised. He pushed his coffee container away and got up.
‘My name is Ahlberg,’ he said.
There was something expectant in his manner. Martin Beck had seen the same thing before and knew what this sprang from. He was the expert from Stockholm and the man behind the desk was a country policeman who had come to a standstill on an investigation. The next few minutes would be decisive for their cooperation.
‘What's your first name?’ said Martin Beck.
‘Gunnar.’
‘What are Kollberg and Melander doing?’
‘I have no idea. Something I've forgotten, I suspect.’
‘Did they have that we'll-settle-this-thing-in-a-flash look?’
The local policeman ran his fingers through his thin blond hair. Then he smiled wryly and took to his familiar chair.
‘Just about,’ he said.
Martin Beck sat down opposite him, drew out a pack of cigarettes and laid it on the edge of the desk.
‘You look tired,’ Martin Beck stated.
‘My vacation got shot to hell.’
Ahlberg emptied the container of coffee, crumpled it and threw it into the wastepaper basket under the desk.
The disorder on his desk was remarkable. Martin Beck thought about his own desk in Stockholm. It was usually quite neat.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘How goes it?’
‘Not at all,’ said Ahlberg. ‘After more than a week we don't know anything more than what the doctor has told us.’
Out of habit he went on to the routine procedures.
‘Put to death by strangulation in conjunction with sexual assault. The culprit was brutal. Signs of perverse tendencies.’
Martin Beck smiled. Ahlberg looked at him questioningly.
‘You said “put to death”. I say it myself sometimes. We've written too many reports.’
‘Yeah, isn't it hell?’
Ahlberg sighed and ran his fingers through his hair.
‘We brought her up eight days ago,’ he said. ‘We haven't learned a thing since then. We don't know who she is, we don't know the scene of the crime, and we have no suspects. We haven't found a single thing that could have any real connection with her.’
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‘Death by strangulation,’ thought Martin Beck.
He sat and thumbed through a bunch of photographs which Ahlberg had dug out of a basket on his desk. The pictures showed the locks, the dredger, its bucket in the foreground, the body lying on the embankment, and in the mortuary.
Martin Beck placed a photo in front of Ahlberg and said:
‘We can have this picture cropped and retouched so that she looks presentable. Then we can begin knocking on doors. If she comes from around here someone ought to recognize her. How many men can you put on the job?’
‘Three at most,’ said Ahlberg. ‘We're short of men right now. Three of the boys are on vacation and one of them is in the hospital with a broken leg. Other than the Superintendent, Larsson and myself, there are only eight men at the station.’
He counted on his fingers.
‘Yes, and one of them is a woman. Then too, someone has to take care of the other work.’
‘We'll have to help if worst comes to worst. It's going to take a hell of a lot of time. Have you had any trouble with sex criminals lately by the way?’
Ahlberg tapped his pen against his front teeth while he was thinking. Then he reached into his desk drawer and dug up a paper.
‘We had one in for examination. From Västra Ny, a rapist. He was caught in Linköping the day before yesterday but he had an alibi for the entire week, according to this report from Blomgren. He's checking out the institutions.’
Ahlberg placed the paper in a green file which lay on his desk.
They sat quietly for a minute. Martin Beck was hungry. He thought about his wife and her chatter about regular meals. He hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours.
The air in the room was thick with cigarette smoke. Ahlberg got up and opened the window. They could hear a time signal from a radio somewhere in the vicinity.
‘It's one o'clock,’ he said. ‘If you're hungry I can send out for something. I'm as hungry as a bear.’
Martin Beck nodded and Ahlberg picked up the telephone. After a while there was a knock at the door and a girl in a blue dress and a red apron came in with a basket.
After Martin Beck had eaten a ham sandwich and had a few swallows of coffee, he said:
‘How do you think she got there?’
‘I don't know. During the day there are always a lot of people at the locks so it could hardly have happened then. He could have thrown her in from the pier or the embankment and then later the backwash from the boats' propellers might have moved her further out. Or maybe she was thrown overboard from some vessel.’
‘What kind of boats go through the locks? Small boats and pleasure craft?’
‘Some. Not so terribly many. Most of them are freighters. And then there are the canal boats, of course, the Diana, the Juna and the Wilhelm Tham’
‘Can we drive down there and take a look?’ asked Martin Beck.
Ahlberg got up, took the photograph that Martin Beck had chosen, and said: ‘We can get going right away. I'll leave this at the lab on the way out.’
It was almost three o'clock when they returned from Borenshult. The traffic in the locks was lively and Martin Beck had wanted to stay there among the vacationers and the fishermen on the pier to watch the boats.
He had spoken with the crew of the dredger, been out on the embankment and looked at the system of locks. He had seen a sailing canoe cruising in the fresh breeze far out in the water and had begun to long for his own canoe which he had sold several years ago. During the trip back to town he sat thinking about sailing in the archipelago in summers past.
There were eight, fresh copies of the picture from the photo laboratory lying on Ahlberg's desk when they returned. One of the policemen, who was also a photographer, had retouched the picture and the girl's face looked almost as if she had been photographed alive.
Ahlberg looked through them, laid four of the copies in the green folder and said:
‘Fine. I'll pass these out to the boys so that they can get started immediately.’
When he came back after a few minutes Martin Beck was standing next to the desk rubbing his nose.
‘I'd like to make a few telephone calls,’ he said.
‘Use the office farthest down the corridor.’
The room was larger than Ahlberg's and had windows on two walls. It was furnished with two desks, five chairs, a filing cabinet and a typewriter table with a disgracefully old Remington.
Martin Beck sat down, placed his cigarettes and matches on the table, put down the green folder and began to go through the reports. They didn't tell him much more than he had already learned from Ahlberg.
An hour and a half later he ran out of cigarettes. He had placed a few telephone calls without result and had talked to the Commissioner and to Superintendent Larsson who seemed tired and pressed. Just as he had crumpled the empty cigarette package, Kollberg called.
Ten minutes later they met at the hotel.
‘God, you look dismal,’ Kollberg said. ‘Do you want a cigarette?’
‘No thank you. What have you been doing?’
‘I've been talking to a guy from the Motala Times. A local editor in Borensberg. He thought he had found something. A girl from Linköping was to have started a new job in Borensberg ten days ago but she never arrived. She was thought to have left Linköping the day before and, since then, no one has heard from her. No one thought to report her missing since she was generally unreliable. This newspaperman knew her employer and started making his own inquiries but never bothered to get a description of her. But I did. And it isn't the same girl. This one was fat and blonde. She's still missing. It took me the entire day.’
He leaned back in his chair and picked his teeth with a match.
‘What do we do now?’
‘Ahlberg has sent out a few of his boys to knock on doors. You ought to give them a hand. When Melander gets here we'll have a run through with the Commissioner and Larsson. Go over to Ahlberg and he'll tell you what to do.’
Kollberg straightened his chair and got up.
‘Are you coming too?’ he asked.
‘No, not now. Tell Ahlberg that I'm in my room if he wants anything.’
When he got to his room Martin Beck took off his jacket, shoes, and tie and sat down on the edge of the bed.
The weather had cleared and white puffs of cloud moved across the sky. The afternoon sun shone into the room.
Martin Beck got up, opened the window a little, and closed the thin, yellow curtains. Then he lay down on the bed with his hands folded under his head.
He thought about the girl who had been pulled out of Boren's bottom mud.
When he closed his eyes he saw her before him as she looked in the picture, naked and abandoned, with narrow shoulders and her dark hair in a coil across her throat.
Who was she? What had she thought? How had she lived? Whom had she met?
She was young and he was sure that she had been pretty. She must have had someone who loved her. Someone close to her who was wondering what had happened to her. She must have had friends, colleagues, parents, maybe sisters and brothers. No human being, particularly a young, attractive woman, is so alone that there is no one to miss her when she disappears.
