Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook first published by Harper Perennial in 2006

This 4th Estate edition published in 2016

First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz Ltd in 1968

Originally published in Stockholm, Sweden, by P. A. Norstedt & Soners Forlag

Copyright text © Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö 1965

Copyright introduction © Henning Mankell 2006

Cover photograph © Getty Images

PS Section © Richard Shephard 2006

PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007232833

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780007324378

Version: 2018-05-15

From the reviews of the Martin Beck series:

‘First class’ Daily Telegraph

‘One of the most authentic, gripping and profound collections of police procedurals ever accomplished’ MICHAEL CONNELLY

‘Hauntingly effective storytelling’ New York Times

‘There's just no question about it: the reigning King and Queen of mystery fiction are Maj Sjöwall and her husband Per Wahlöö’ The National Observer

‘Sjöwall/Wahlöö are the best writers of police procedural in the world’ Birmingham Post

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

About the Authors

Also by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

I read Roseanna almost as soon as it came out, back in 1965. Now, as I'm reading the novel again, I realize that my first reading took place forty years ago and I was only seventeen at the time. Right now that seems to me incomprehensible. How many books have I read since then? And why is it that I remember Roseanna so well? I have a strong and indisputable memory that back then I thought of the novel as straightforward and clear, a convincing story presented in an equally convincing form. Today, as I reread the novel, I see that my first impression still holds true. The book has hardly aged at all. Even the language seems energetic and alive. But what has changed is the world, and I have too. Back then everybody smoked all the time, and there were no mobile phones; public telephones were in use. Everyone went to cafes for lunch, no one had tiny tape recorders in their pockets, and computers were still practically unknown. Sweden was still a society with closer ties to the past than to the future. The huge waves of immigrants hadn't yet begun. Workers arrived to take jobs in certain major industries, but as yet there was no steady influx of refugees. And everyone showed their passports at the border, even those who were travelling only to Norway or Denmark.

Per Wahlöö has now been dead for many years, while Maj Sjöwall has grown older along with me and all the readers they reached a generation ago. Now I'm rereading the novel Roseanna on a December day forty years after its first publication. I've forgotten a great deal, of course, but the novel still stands strong. It's well thought-out, well structured. It's evident that Sjöwall and Wahlöö had carefully laid the groundwork for their plan to write ten books about the National Homicide Bureau — in fictional form but based on reality.

The aim is quite clear. From the very first pages of the novel, for instance, the authors present a thorough examination of the joint decision-making process of various agencies as they organize the dredging of a sludge-filled area of the Göta Canal. This desire to be as thorough as possible continues throughout the entire novel. The intent of the authors is evident — they build up a trust in their readers by presenting meticulous and credible descriptions of various institutions and structures within Swedish society, as it was in the mid-1960s. A country in which Tage Erlander was the prime minister, and cars still drove on the left-hand side of the road.

There is one small detail on the second page of the novel that fascinates me when I see it again. The story begins in early July, with the date clearly specified. A dredging boat has arrived at the canal in Östergötland. The authors write: ‘the vessel… moored at Borenshult as the neighbourhood children and a Vietnamese tourist looked on.’ A Vietnamese tourist! In Sweden in 1965! That may have happened once, at most. But here the authors are giving a nod to the major event of my generation, the Vietnam War. It was the period in Sweden's post-war history when the world had begun to open up. This is worth pointing out, since the authors had a radical purpose in mind for the books they were planning about the National Homicide Bureau. They wanted to use crime and criminal investigations as a mirror of Swedish society — and later on include the rest of the world. Their intent was never to write crime stories as a form of entertainment. They were influenced and inspired by the American writer Ed McBain. They realized that there was a huge, unexplored territory in which crime novels could form the framework for stories containing social criticism.

I can't even count how many times I've been asked what Sjöwall and Wahlöö's books have meant to me. I think that anyone who writes about crime as a reflection of society has been inspired to some extent by what they wrote. They broke with the previous trends in crime fiction. In Sweden Stieg Trenter dominated the market in the 1950s, along with Maria Lang and H. K. Rönnblom. They wrote detective stories in which solving the mystery was the main concern. In Trenter's books, the streets, pubs and food are all described in great detail, but the setting is merely the setting — there is never any direct, real-life connection between the crime and the place where it occurred. The British-style detective novel was the dominant form until the publication of Roseanna. Of particular importance was the fact that Sjöwall and Wahlöö broke with the hopelessly stereotyped character descriptions that were so prevalent. They showed people evolving right before the reader's eyes.

Before 1965 I had read several of Per Wahlöö's novels. I recall especially The Lorry, which was set in fascist Spain. He wrote well, using a straightforward and simple language that gave his story a certain force. I liked what I read. But the publication of Roseanna signalled something very different. I don't know exactly what it meant for Maj Sjöwall to become his collaborator, except that she must have been a source of great inspiration. I have a clear memory that I went back and reread Roseanna after a couple of weeks. I can't remember ever having done that before.

Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall have said that they did find inspiration for their work in the United States. I've already mentioned Ed McBain. But I suspect that they most likely sought inspiration farther back in time, at least as far back as Edgar Allan Poe in the nineteenth century. Many consider Poe's stories from the mid-1800s to be the basis for modern crime fiction. I don't agree. This seems to indicate a serious lack of understanding even today, because the roots of crime fiction go back much farther. Read the classic Greek dramas! What are they about? People and society tangled up in hostilities which lead to violence, crime, and punishment. And there is also an element of crime writing mirrored in the works of Shakespeare. Of course there aren't any police, but there are investigations, analyses, and attempts to understand who and what lie behind certain brutal crimes. We are continuing traditions, whether we're conscious of doing so or not.

In many ways Roseanna is an incredibly fascinating book. I don't intend to discuss the plot or the resolution of the crime, but let me say that it's probably one of the first crime novels in which time clearly plays a major role. There are long periods during which nothing happens, when the investigation into who murdered Roseanna and threw her into the Göta Canal seems to be standing still; then it may move a few centimetres before coming to a halt again. It's quite clear that for Martin Beck and his colleagues, the passage of time is both frustrating and a necessary evil. Homicide investigators who have no patience lack a key tool. It takes six months before the crime is solved. By then we, as readers, know that it could just as well have taken five years, but the police would not have given up. The book describes the fundamental virtue of the police: patience.

I haven't counted how many times Martin Beck feels sick in Roseanna, but it happens a lot. He can't eat breakfast because he doesn't feel good. Cigarettes and train rides make him sick. His personal life also makes him ill. In Roseanna the homicide investigators emerge as ordinary human beings. There is nothing at all heroic about them. They do their job, and they get sick. I no longer remember how I reacted forty years ago, but I think it was a revelation to see such real people as police officers in Roseanna.

And the book still holds up today. It's lively, stylistically taut, and the unfolding of the story is skilfully planned.

Of course it's a modern classic. It was the first one in the series of ten books that Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö had planned. And even with their very first book, they hit the mark.

Henning Mankell

1

They found the corpse on the eighth of July just after three o'clock in the afternoon. It was fairly well intact and couldn't have been lying in the water very long.

Actually, it was mere chance that they found the body at all. And finding it so quickly should have aided the police investigation.

Below the locks at Borenshult there is a breakwater which protects the entrance to the lake from the east wind. When the canal opened for traffic that spring, the channel had begun to clog up. The boats had a hard time manoeuvring and their propellers churned up thick clouds of yellowish mud from the bottom. It wasn't hard to see that something had to be done. As early as May, the Canal Company requisitioned a dredging machine from the Civil Engineering Board. The papers were passed from one perplexed civil servant to another and finally remitted to the Swedish National Shipping and Navigation Administration. The Shipping and Navigation Administration thought that the work should be done by one of the Civil Engineering Board's bucket dredging machines. But the Civil Engineering Board found that the Shipping and Navigation Administration had control over bucket dredging machines and in desperation made an appeal to the Harbour Commission in Norrköping, which immediately returned the papers to the Shipping and Navigation Administration, which remitted them to the Civil Engineering Board, at which point someone picked up the telephone and dialled an engineer who knew all about bucket dredging machines. He knew that of the five existing bucket dredgers, there was only one that could pass through the locks. The vessel was called The Pig and happened just then to be lying in the fishing harbour at Gravarne. On the morning of 5 July The Pig arrived and moored at Borenshult as the neighbourhood children and a Vietnamese tourist looked on.

One hour later a representative of the Canal Company went on board to discuss the project. That took the whole afternoon. The next day was a Saturday and the vessel remained by the breakwater while the men went home for the weekend. The crew consisted of a dredging foreman, who was also the officer in command with the authority to take the vessel to sea, an excavating engineer, and a deck man. The latter two men were from Gothenburg and took the night train from Motala. The skipper lived in Nacka and his wife came to get him in their car. At seven o'clock on Monday morning all three were on board again and one hour later they began to dredge. By eleven o'clock the hold was full and the dredger went out into the lake to dump. On the way back they had to lay off and wait while a white steamboat approached the Boren locks in a westerly direction. Foreign tourists crowded along the vessel's railing and waved excitedly at the working crew on the dredger. The passenger boat was elevated slowly up the locks towards Motala and Lake Vättern and by lunch time its top pennant had disappeared behind the uppermost sluice gate. At one-thirty the men began to dredge again.

The situation was this: the weather was warm and beautiful with mild temperate winds and idly moving summer clouds. There were some people on the breakwater and on the edge of the canal. Most of them were sunning themselves, a few were fishing, and two or three were watching the dredging activity. The dredger's bucket had just gobbled up a new mouthful of Boren's bottom slime and was on its way up out of the water. The excavating engineer was operating the familiar handgrips in his cabin. The dredging foreman was having a cup of coffee in the galley, and the deck man stood with his elbows on the railing and spat in the water. The bucket was still on the way up.

As it broke through the surface of the water, a man on the pier took a few steps towards the boat. He waved his arms and shouted something. The deck man looked up to hear better.

‘There's someone in the bucket! Stop! Someone's lying in the bucket!’

The confused deck man looked first at the man and then at the bucket which slowly swung in over the hold to spit out its contents. Filthy grey water streamed out of the bucket as it hung over the hold. Then the deck man saw what the man on the breakwater had seen. A white, naked arm stuck out of the bucket's jaw.

The next ten minutes seemed endless and chaotic. Someone stood on the pier and said, over and over again: ‘Don't do anything; don't touch anything; leave everything alone until the police come …’

The excavating engineer came out to see what was going on. He stared, then hurried back to the relative security of his seat behind the levers. As he let the crane swing and the bucket open, the dredging foreman and the deck man took out the body.

It was a woman. They laid her on her back on a folded tarpaulin out on the breakwater. A group of amazed people gathered around and stared at her. Some of them were children and shouldn't have been there but no one thought to send them away. But all of them had one thing in common: they would never forget how she looked.

The deck man had thrown three buckets of water over her. Long afterwards, when the police inquiry was bogged down, there were people who criticized him for this.

She was naked and had no jewellery on. The lines of her tan made it apparent that she had sunbathed in a bikini. Her hips were broad and she had heavy thighs. Her pubic hair was black and wet and thick. Her breasts were small and slack with large, dark nipples. A red scratch ran from her waist to her hipbone. The rest of her skin was smooth without spots or scars. She had small hands and feet and her nails were not polished. Her face was swollen and it was hard to imagine how she had actually looked alive. She had thick, dark eyebrows and her mouth seemed wide. Her medium-length hair was dark and lay flat on her head. A coil of hair lay across her throat.

2

Motala is a medium-sized Swedish city in the province of Östergötland at the northern end of Lake Vättern. It has a population of 27,000. Its highest police authority is a Commissioner of Police who is also the Public Prosecutor. He has a Police Superintendent under him who is the chief executive of both the regular police constabulary and the criminal police. His staff also includes a First Detective Inspector in the ninth salary grade, six policemen and one policewoman. One of the policemen is a trained photographer and when medical examinations are needed they usually fall back on one of the city's doctors.

One hour after the first alarm, several of these people had gathered on the pier at Borenshult, several yards from the harbour light. It was rather crowded around the corpse and the men on the dredger could no longer see what was happening. They were still on board in spite of the fact that the vessel was prepared to make way with its port bow against the breakwater.

The number of people behind the police barricade on the abutment had increased tenfold. On the other side of the canal there were several cars, four of which belonged to the police, and a white-painted ambulance with red crosses on the back doors. Two men in white overalls leaned against a fender smoking. They seemed to be the only people who weren't interested in the group out by the harbour light.

On the breakwater the doctor began to gather his things together. He chatted with the Superintendent who was a tall, grey-haired man named Larsson.

‘There isn't much I can say about it now,’ said the doctor.

‘Does she have to remain lying here?’ Larsson asked.

‘Isn't that more your business?’ replied the doctor.

‘This is hardly the scene of the crime.’

‘Okay,’ the doctor agreed. ‘See that they drive her to the mortuary. I'll telephone ahead.’

He shut his bag and left.

The Superintendent turned and called, ‘Ahlberg, you're going to keep the area blocked off, aren't you?’

‘Yes, damn it.’

The Commissioner of Police hadn't said anything out by the harbour light. He didn't usually enter investigations in the early stages. But on the way into town, he said: ‘You'll keep me informed.’

Larsson didn't even bother to nod.

‘You'll keep Ahlberg on it?’

‘Ahlberg's a good man,’ said the Superintendent.

‘Yes, of course.’

The conversation ended. They arrived, left the car and went into their separate offices. The Commissioner placed a telephone call to the County Authority in Linköping who merely said: ‘I'll be waiting to hear from you.’

The Superintendent had a short conversation with Ahlberg. ‘We have to find out who she is.’

‘Yes,’ said Ahlberg.

He went into his office, called the Fire Department and requisitioned two frogmen. Then he read through a report on a burglary in the harbour. That one would be cleared up soon. Ahlberg got up and went to the officer on duty.

‘Is there anyone reported missing?’

‘No.’

‘No notification of missing persons?’

‘None that fit.’

He went back to his office and waited.

The call came after fifteen minutes.

‘We have to ask for an autopsy,’ said the doctor.

‘Was she strangled?’

‘I think so.’

‘Raped?’

‘I think so.’

The doctor paused a second. Then he said: ‘And pretty methodically, too.’

Ahlberg bit on his index fingernail. He thought of his vacation which was to begin on Friday and how happy his wife was about it.

The doctor misinterpreted the silence.

‘Are you surprised?’

‘No,’ said Ahlberg.

He hung up and went into Larsson's office. Then they went to the Commissioner's office together.

Ten minutes later the Commissioner asked for a medico-legal post-mortem examination from the County Administrator who contacted the Government Institute for Forensic Medicine. The autopsy was conducted by a seventy-year-old professor. He came on the night train from Stockholm and seemed bright and cheerful. He conducted the autopsy in eight hours, almost without a break.

Then he left a preliminary report with the following wording: ‘Death by strangulation in conjunction with gross sexual assault. Severe inner bleeding.’

By that time the records of the inquiry and reports had already begun to accumulate on Ahlberg's desk. They could be summed up in one sentence: a dead woman had been found in the lock chamber at Borenshult.

No one had been reported missing in the city or in neighbouring police districts. There was no description of any such missing person.

3

It was a quarter past five in the morning and it was raining. Martin Beck took more time brushing his teeth than usual to get rid of the taste of lead in his mouth.

He buttoned his collar, tied his tie and looked listlessly at his face in the mirror. He shrugged his shoulders and went out into the hall, continued on through the living room, glanced longingly at the half-finished model of the training ship, Danmark, on which he had worked until the late hours the night before, and went into the kitchen.

He moved quietly and softly, partly from habit and partly not to wake the children.

He sat down at the kitchen table.

‘Hasn't the newspaper come yet?’ he said.

‘It never comes before six,’ his wife answered.

It was completely light outside but overcast. The daylight in the kitchen was grey and soupy. His wife hadn't turned on the lights. She called that saving.

He opened his mouth but closed it again without saying anything. There would only be an argument and this wasn't the moment for it. Instead he drummed slowly with his fingers on the formica table top. He looked at the empty cup with its blue rose pattern and a chip in the rim and a brown crack down from the notch. That cup had hung on for almost the duration of their marriage. More than ten years. She rarely broke anything, in any case not irreparably. The odd part of it was that the children were the same.

Could such qualities be inherited? He didn't know.

She took the coffee pot from the stove and filled his cup. He stopped drumming on the table.

‘Don't you want a sandwich?’ she asked.

He drank carefully with small gulps. He was sitting slightly round-shouldered at the end of the table.

‘You really ought to eat something,’ she insisted.

‘You know I can't eat in the morning.’

‘You ought to in any case,’ she said. ‘Especially you, with your stomach.’

He rubbed his fingers over his cheek and felt some places he'd missed with his razor. He drank some coffee.

‘I can make some toast,’ she suggested.

Five minutes later he placed his cup on the saucer, moved it away without a sound, and looked up at his wife.

She had on a fluffy red bathrobe over a nylon nightgown and she sat with her elbows on the table, supporting her chin with her hands. She was blonde, with fair skin and round, slightly popping eyes. She usually darkened her eyebrows but they had paled during the summer and were now nearly as light as her hair. She was a few years older than he and in spite of the fact that she had gained a good deal of weight in the last few years, the skin on her throat was beginning to sag a little.

She had given up her job in an architect's office when their daughter was born twelve years ago and since then had not thought about working again. When the boy started school, Martin Beck had suggested she look for some part-time work, but she had figured it would hardly pay. Besides, she was comfortable with her own nature and pleased with her role as a housewife.

‘Oh, yes,’ thought Martin Beck and got up. He placed the blue-painted stool under the table quietly and stood by the window looking out at the drizzle.

Down below the parking place and lawn, the highway lay smooth and empty. Not many windows were lit in the apartments on the hill behind the subway station. A few seagulls circled under the low, grey sky. Otherwise there was not another living thing to be seen.

‘Where are you going?’ she said.

‘Motala.’

‘Will you be gone long?’

‘I don't know.’

‘Is it that girl?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think you'll be gone long?’

‘I don't know any more about it than you do. Only what I've seen in the newspapers.’

‘Why do you have to take the train?’

‘The others took off yesterday. I wasn't supposed to go along.’

‘They'll drive with you, of course, as usual?’

He took a patient breath and gazed outside. The rain was letting up.

‘Where will you stay?’

‘The City Hotel.’

‘Who will be with you?’

‘Kollberg and Melander. They went yesterday.’

‘By car?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you have to sit and get shaken up on the train?’

‘Yes.’

Behind him he heard her washing the cup with the chip in the rim and the blue roses.

‘I have to pay the electric bill and also Little One's riding lessons this week.’

‘Don't you have enough money for that?’

‘I don't want to take it out of the bank, you know that.’

‘No, of course not.’

He took his wallet out of his inner pocket and looked into it. Took out a 50 crown note, looked at it, put it back and placed the wallet back in his pocket.

‘I hate to draw out money,’ she said. ‘It's the beginning of the end when you start that.’

He took the bill out again, folded it, turned around and laid it on the kitchen table.

‘I've packed your bag, Martin.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Take care of your throat. This is a treacherous time of the year, particularly the evenings.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to take that awful pistol with you?’

‘Yes, no. Yes, no. What's the difference?’ Martin Beck thought to himself.

‘What are you laughing at?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’

He went into the living room, unlocked a drawer in the secretary and took out the pistol. He put it in his suitcase and locked the drawer again.

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.’

4

‘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.

Martin Beck thought about this for a long time. No one had inquired about her. He felt sorry for the girl whom no one missed. He couldn't understand why. Maybe she had said that she was going away? If so, it might be a long time before someone wondered where she was.

The question was: how long?

5

It was eleven-thirty in the morning and Martin Beck's third day in Motala. He had got up early but accomplished nothing by it. Now he was sitting at the small desk thumbing through his notebook. He had reached for the telephone a few times, thinking that he really ought to call home, but nothing had come of the idea.

Just like so many other things.

He put on his hat, locked the door to his room, and walked down the stairs. The easy chairs in the hotel lobby were occupied by several journalists and two camera cases with folded tripods, bound by straps, lay on the floor. One of the press photographers stood leaning against the wall near the entrance smoking a cigarette. He was a very young man and he moved his cigarette to the corner of his mouth and raised his Leica to look through the viewer.

When Martin Beck went past the group he drew his hat down over his face, ducked his head against his shoulder and walked straight ahead. This was merely a reflex action but it always seemed to irritate someone because one of the reporters said, surprisingly sourly:

‘Say, will there be a dinner with the leaders of the search this evening?’

Martin Beck mumbled something without even knowing what he had said himself and continued towards the door. The second before he had opened the door, he heard the little click which indicated that the photographer had taken a picture.

He walked quickly down the street, but only until he thought he was out of the range of the camera. Then he stopped and stood there indecisively for about ten seconds. He threw a half-smoked cigarette into the gutter, shrugged his shoulders and walked over to a taxi stand. He slumped into the back seat, rubbed the tip of his nose with his right index finger, and peered over towards the hotel. From under his hat brim he saw the man who had spoken to him in the lobby. The journalist stood directly in front of the hotel and stared after the taxi. But only for a moment. Then he, too, shrugged his shoulders and went back into the hotel.

Press people and personnel from the Homicide Division of the National Police often stayed at the same hotel. After a speedy and successful solution to a crime, they often spent the last evening eating and drinking together. Over the years this had become a custom. Martin Beck didn't like it but several of his colleagues thought otherwise.

Even though he hadn't been on his own very much, he had still learned a little about Motala during the forty-eight hours he had been there. At least he knew the names of the streets. He watched the street signs as the taxi drove by them. He told the driver to stop at the bridge, paid him, and stepped out. He stood with his hands on the railing and looked along the canal. While he stood there he realized that he had forgotten to ask the driver to give him a receipt for the fare and that there would probably be some kind of idiotic nonsense back at the office if he were to make one out himself. It would be best to type out the information, it would give more substance to his request.

He was still thinking about that as he walked along the path on the north side of the canal.

During the morning hours there had been a few rain showers and the air was fresh and light. He stopped, right in the middle of the path, and felt how fresh it was. He drank in the cool, clean odour of wild flowers and wet grass. It reminded him of his childhood, but that was before tobacco smoke, petrol odours and mucus had robbed his senses of their sharpness. Nowadays it wasn't often he had this pleasure.

Martin Beck had passed the five locks and continued along the sea wall. Several small boats were moored near the locks and by the breakwater, and a few small sailing boats could be seen out in the open water. One hundred and fifty feet beyond the jetty, the dredger's bucket clanged and clattered under the watchful eye of some seagulls who were flying in wide, low circles. Their heads moved from one side to the other as they waited for whatever the bucket might bring up from the bottom. Their powers of observation and their patience were admirable, as was their staying power and optimism. They reminded Martin Beck of Kollberg and Melander.

He walked to the end of the breakwater and stood there for a while. She had been lying here, or more accurately, her violated body had been lying here, on a crumpled tarpaulin practically on view to anyone for public inspection. After a few hours it had been carried away by two businesslike, uniformed men with a stretcher and, in time, an elderly gentleman whose profession it was to do so had opened it up, examined it in detail, and then sewn it together again before it was sent to the mortuary. He hadn't seen it himself. There was always something to be thankful for.

Martin Beck became conscious of the fact that he was standing with his hands clasped behind his back as he shifted his weight from the sole of one foot to another, a habit from his years as a patrolman which was totally unconscious and almost unbreakable. He was standing and staring at a grey and uninteresting piece of ground from where the chalk marks from the first, routine investigation had long since been washed away by the rain. He must have occupied himself with this for a long time because the surroundings had gone through a number of changes. When he looked up he observed a small, white passenger boat entering one of the locks at a good speed. When it passed the dredger, some twenty cameras pointed at it, and, as if to underscore the situation, the dredging foreman climbed out of his cabin and also photographed the passenger boat. Martin Beck followed the boat with his eyes as it passed the jetty and noted certain ugly details. The hull had clean lines but the mast was cut off and the original smokestack, which had surely been high and straight and beautiful, had been replaced by a strange, streamlined little tin hood. From inside the ship growled something that must have been a diesel engine. The deck was full of tourists. Nearly all of them seemed to be elderly or middle-aged and several of them wore straw hats with flowered bands.

The boat was named Juno. He remembered that Ahlberg had mentioned this name the first time they had met.

There were a lot of people on the breakwater and along the edge of the canal now. Some of them fished and others sunbathed, but most of them were chiefly occupied with watching the boat. For the first time in several hours Martin Beck found a reason to say something.

‘Does the boat always pass here at this time of day?’

‘Yes, if it comes from Stockholm. Twelve-thirty. Right. The one that goes in the other direction comes by later, just after four. They meet at Vadstena. They tie up there.’

‘There are a lot of people here, on shore, I mean.’

‘They come down to see the boat.’

‘Are there always so many?’

‘Usually.’

The man he was talking to took the pipe from his mouth and spat in the water.

‘Some pleasure,’ he said. ‘To stand and stare at a bunch of tourists.’

When Martin Beck walked back along the brink of the canal he passed the little passenger boat again. It was now about halfway up, peacefully rising in the third lock. A number of passengers had gone on land. Several of them were photographing the boat, others crowded around the kiosk on shore where they were buying postcards and plastic souvenirs which, without doubt, were made in Hong Kong.

Martin Beck couldn't really say that he was short of time so with his innate respect for government budgets he took the bus back to town instead of a taxi.

There were no newspapermen in the hotel lobby and no messages for him at the desk. He went up to his room, sat down at the table and looked out over the Square. Actually he should have gone over to the police station but he had already been there twice before lunch.

Half an hour later he telephoned Ahlberg.

‘Hi. I'm glad you called. The Public Prosecutor is here.’

‘And?’

‘He's going to hold a press conference at six o'clock. He seems worried.’

‘Oh.’

‘He would like you to be there.’

‘I'll be there.’

‘Will you bring Kollberg with you. I haven't had time to tell him yet.’

‘Where is Melander?’

‘Out with one of my boys following up a lead.’

‘Did it sound as if it could be anything important?’

‘Hell, no.’

‘And otherwise?’

‘Nothing. The Prosecutor is worried about the press. The other telephone is ringing now.’

‘So long. See you later.’

He remained seated at the table and listlessly smoked all his cigarettes. Then he looked at the clock, got up, and went out into the corridor. He stopped three doors down the hall, knocked and walked in, quietly and very quickly, in his usual manner.

Kollberg lay on the bed reading an evening paper. He had taken off his shoes and jacket and opened his shirt. His service pistol lay on the night table, wrapped up in his tie.

‘We've fallen back to page twelve today,’ he said. ‘The poor devils, they don't have an easy time of it.’

‘Who?’

‘Those reporters. “The mystery tightens around the bestial murder of the woman in Motala. Not only the local police but even the Homicide Division of the National Police are fumbling around hopelessly in the dark.” I wonder where they get all that?’

Kollberg was fat and had a nonchalant and jovial manner which caused many people to make fateful mistakes in judging him.

‘“The case seemed to be a routine one in the beginning but has become more and more complicated. The leaders of the search are uncommunicative but are working along several different lines. The naked beauty in Boren …” oh, crap!’

He looked through the rest of the article and threw the newspaper on the floor.

‘Yes, she was some beauty. A completely ordinary bowlegged woman with a big rear end and very small breasts.’

‘She had a big crotch, of course,’ said Kollberg. ‘And that was her misfortune,’ he added philosophically.

‘Have you seen her?’ Martin Beck asked.

‘Of course, haven't you?’

‘Only her pictures.’

‘Well, I've seen her,’ said Kollberg.

‘What have you been doing this afternoon?’

‘What do you think? Reports from knocking on doors. What garbage! It's insane to send out fifteen different guys all over the place. Everybody expresses themselves differently and sees things differently. Some of them write four pages about seeing a one-eyed cat and saying that the kids in a house are snot-nosed, and others write up finding three bodies and a time bomb in a few paragraphs. They even ask totally different questions.’

Martin Beck said nothing. Kollberg sighed.

‘They should have a formula,’ he said. ‘They would save four-fifths of the time.’

‘Yes.’

Martin Beck searched in his pockets.

‘As you know I don't smoke,’ said Kollberg jokingly.

‘The Public Prosecutor is holding a press conference in half an hour. He would like us to be there.’

‘Oh. That ought to be lively.’

He pointed to the newspaper and said:

‘If we questioned the reporters for once. For four days in a row that guy has written that an arrest can be expected before the end of the afternoon. And the girl looks a little bit like Anita Ekberg and a little bit like Sophia Loren.’

He sat up in bed, buttoned his shirt and began to lace his shoes.

Martin Beck walked over to the window.

‘It's going to rain any minute,’ he said.

‘Oh damn,’ Kollberg said and yawned.

‘Are you tired?’

‘I slept two hours last night. We were out in the woods in the moonlight searching for that type from St Sigfrid's.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Yes, of course! And after we had wandered around for seven hours in this damn tourist place someone got around to telling us that the boys back at Klara station in Stockholm got the guy in Berzelii Park the night before last.’

Kollberg finished dressing and put his pistol in place. He took a quick look at Martin Beck and said: ‘You look depressed. What is it?’

‘Nothing special.’

‘Okay, let's go. The world press is waiting.’

There were about twenty journalists in the room in which the press conference was to be held. In addition, the Public Prosecutor, the Superintendent of Police, Larsson, and a TV photographer with two spotlights were there. Ahlberg wasn't there. The Prosecutor sat behind a table and was looking thoughtfully through a folder. Several of the others were standing. There weren't enough chairs for everyone. It was noisy and everyone was talking at once. The room was crowded and the air was already unpleasant. Martin Beck, who disliked crowds, took several steps away from the others and stood with his back to the wall in the space between those who would ask the questions and those who would answer them.

After several minutes the Public Prosecutor turned to the Chief of Police and asked, loudly enough to cut through all the other noise in the room:

‘Where the devil is Ahlberg?’

Larsson grabbed the telephone and forty seconds later Ahlberg entered the room. He was red-eyed and perspiring and still in the process of getting into his jacket.

The Public Prosecutor stood up and knocked lightly on the table with his fountain pen. He was tall and well built and quite correctly dressed, but almost too elegant.

‘Gentlemen, I am pleased to see that so many of you have come to this impromptu press conference. I see representatives of all branches of media, the press, radio and television.’

He bowed slightly towards the TV photographer, who was obviously the only press person present in the room whom he could definitely identify.

‘I am also pleased to be able to say that from the outset your manner of handling this tragic and … sensitive matter has been, for the most part, correct and responsible. Unfortunately, there have been a few exceptions. Sensationalism and loose speculations do not help in such a … sensitive case as …’

Kollberg yawned and didn't even bother to put his hand in front of his mouth.

‘As you all know this case has … and I certainly do not need to point it out again, special… sensitive aspects and …’

From the opposite side of the room Ahlberg looked at Martin Beck, his pale blue eyes filled with gloomy recognition and understanding.

‘… and just these … sensitive aspects call for a particularly careful way of treating them.’

The Public Prosecutor continued to speak. Martin Beck looked over the shoulder of the reporter who sat in front of him and saw a drawing of a star on his notebook. The TV man was leaning against his tripod.

‘… and naturally I want to, no, more properly said, we neither want to nor can we hide our gratefulness for all the help in this … sensitive case. In short, we need the support of what we often call that great detective, the Public.’

Kollberg yawned again. Ahlberg looked desperately unhappy.

Martin Beck finally ventured a look at the people in the room. He knew three of the journalists, they were older and came from Stockholm. He also recognized a few others. Most of them seemed very young.

‘In addition, gentlemen, the collected information that we do have is at your disposal,’ said the Public Prosecutor and sat down.

With that he had clearly said his piece. In the beginning Larsson answered the questions. Most of them were asked by three young reporters who followed each other's questions in rapid order. Martin Beck noted that a number of newspapermen sat quietly and didn't take any notes. Their attitude towards the lack of real leads in the case seemed to show compassion and understanding. The photographers yawned. The room was already thick with cigarette smoke.

QUESTION: Why hasn't there been a real press conference before this one?

ANSWER: There haven't been many leads in this case. In addition, there are certain important facts in this case that could not be made public without hindering its solution.

QUESTION: Is an arrest immediately forthcoming?

ANSWER: It is conceivable, but from the present standpoint we cannot give you a definite answer, unfortunately.

QUESTION: Do you have any real clues in this case?

ANSWER: All we can say is that our investigations are following certain distinct lines.

(After this amazing series of half truths the Chief of Police threw a sorrowful look at the Public Prosecutor who stubbornly examined his cuticles.)

QUESTION: Criticism has been directed towards several of my colleagues. Is it the opinion of those in charge of the case that these colleagues have more or less intentionally twisted the facts?

(This question was asked by the notoriously well-known reporter whose article had made such a deep impression on Kollberg.)

ANSWER: Yes, unfortunately.

QUESTION: Isn't it more a case of the police leaving us reporters out in the cold and not giving us useful information? And deliberately leaving us to our own devices to find out whatever we can in the field?

ANSWER: Hmm.

(Several of the less talkative journalists began to show signs of displeasure.)

QUESTION: Have you identified the corpse?

(Superintendent Larsson, with a quick glance, threw the ball over to Ahlberg, sat down, and demonstratively took a cigar out of his breast pocket.)

ANSWER: No.

QUESTION: Is it possible that she is from this city or somewhere around here?

ANSWER: It doesn't seem likely.

QUESTION: Why not?

ANSWER: If that were the case we would have been able to identify her.

QUESTION: Is that your only reason for suspecting that she comes from another part of the country?

(Ahlberg looked dismally at the Chief of Police who was devoting all his attention to his cigar.)

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: Has the search of the bottom near the breakwater produced any results?

ANSWER: We have found a number of things.

QUESTION: Do these things have anything to do with the crime?

ANSWER: That is not easy to answer.

QUESTION: How old was she?

ANSWER: Presumably between twenty-five and thirty.

QUESTION: Exactly how long had she been dead when she was found?

ANSWER: That isn't easy to answer, either. Between three and four days.

QUESTION: The information that has been given to the public is very vague. Isn't it possible to tell us something more exact, information which really says something?

ANSWER: That's what we are trying to do here. We have also retouched a picture of her face which you are welcome to, if you want to have it.

(Ahlberg reached for a group of papers on the desk and started to hand them out. The air in the room was heavy and humid.)

QUESTION: Did she have any particular marks on her body?

ANSWER: Not as far as we know.

QUESTION: What does that mean?

ANSWER: Simply, that she had no marks at all.

QUESTION: Has a dental examination given any special clues?

ANSWER: She had good teeth.

(A long and pressing pause followed. Martin Beck noted that the reporter in front of him was still doodling with the star he had drawn.)

QUESTION: Is it possible that the body was thrown into the water at some other place and that it was brought to the breakwater by the current?

ANSWER: It doesn't seem likely.

QUESTION: Have you learned anything by knocking on doors?

ANSWER: We are still working on that.

QUESTION: To sum up, isn't it true that the police have a complete mystery on their hands?

It was the Public Prosecutor that answered:

‘Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning.’

With that, the press conference ended.

On the way out, one of the older reporters stopped Martin Beck, laid his hand on his arm and said: ‘Don't you know anything at all?’ Martin Beck shook his head.

In Ahlberg's office two men were going through all the material they had gathered from the operation of knocking on doors.

Kollberg walked over to the desk, looked at several of the papers, and shrugged his shoulders.

Ahlberg came in. He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. Then he turned to Martin Beck and said: ‘The Public Prosecutor wants to talk to you. He is still in the other room.’

The Prosecutor and the Police Superintendent were still sitting behind the table.

‘Beck,’ said the Prosecutor, ‘I don't see that your presence is necessary here any longer. There simply is not enough work for the three of you.’

‘That's true.’

‘In general I think that a lot of what is left to do can be done conveniently somewhere else.’

‘That is possible.’

‘To put it simply, I don't want to detain you here, especially if your presence is more motivated in another direction.’

‘That is also my point of view,’ the Chief of Police added.

‘Mine also,’ said Martin Beck.

They shook hands.

In Ahlberg's office it was still very quiet. Martin Beck did not break that silence.

After a while Melander came in. He hung up his hat and nodded to the others. Then he went over to the desk, sat down at Ahlberg's typewriter, put some paper in it and knocked out a few lines. He pulled the paper out of the typewriter, signed it, and placed it in the folder on the desk.

‘Was that anything?’ asked Ahlberg.

‘No,’ said Melander.

He hadn't changed his manner since he had come in.

‘We are going home tomorrow,’ Martin Beck said.

‘Great,’ said Kollberg and yawned.

Martin Beck took a step towards the door and then turned and looked at the man at the typewriter.

‘Are you coming along to the hotel?’ he asked.

Ahlberg put his head back and looked at the ceiling. Then he got up and began to straighten his tie.

In the hotel lobby they separated from Melander.

‘I've already eaten,’ he said. ‘Good night.’

Melander was a clean-living man. In addition he was economical with his expense account and subsisted mainly on hot dogs and soft drinks when he was out on a job.

The other three went into the dining room and sat down.

‘A gin and tonic,’ said Kollberg. ‘Schweppes.’

The others ordered beef, aquavit and beer. Kollberg took his drink and finished it in three swallows. Martin Beck took out a copy of the material which had been given to the reporters and read through it.

‘Will you do me a favour,’ said Martin Beck looking at Kollberg.

‘Always ready to,’ answered Kollberg.

‘I want you to write a new description, write it for me personally. Not a report but a real description. Not a description of a corpse but of a human being. Details. How she might have looked when she was alive. There's no hurry about it.’

Kollberg sat quietly for a while.

‘I understand what you mean,’ he said. ‘By the way, our friend Ahlberg supplied the world press with an untruth today. She actually did have a birthmark, on the inside of her left thigh. Brown. It looked like a pig.’

‘We didn't see it,’ said Ahlberg.

‘I saw it,’ Kollberg said.

Before he left he said:

‘Don't worry about it. No one can see everything. Anyway, it's your murder now. Forget that you've seen me. It was only an illusion. So long.’

‘So long,’ said Ahlberg.

They ate and drank silently. A lot later and without looking up from his drink, Ahlberg said:

‘Are you planning to let this one go now?’

‘No,’ replied Martin Beck.

‘I'm not either,’ said Ahlberg. ‘Never.’

Half an hour later they separated.

When Martin Beck went up to his room he found some folded papers under his door. He opened them and immediately recognized Kollberg's orderly, easy-to-read, handwriting. Because he had known Kollberg well for a long time he wasn't at all surprised.

He undressed, washed the top of his body in cold water and put on his pyjamas. Then he put his shoes out in the corridor, laid his trousers under the mattress, turned on the night table lamp, turned off the ceiling light and got into bed.

Kollberg had written:

The following can be said about the woman who is occupying your thoughts:

1 She was (as you already know) 5 feet, 6 1/2 inches tall, had grey-blue eyes and dark brown hair. Her teeth were good and she had no scars from operations or other marks on her body with the exception of a birthmark, high up on the inside of her left thigh about an inch and a half from her groin. It was brown and about as large as a dime, but uneven and looked like a little pig. She was, according to the man who performed the autopsy (and I had to press him to tell me this on the telephone), 27 or 28 years old. She weighed about 123 pounds.

2 She was built in the following manner: Small shoulders and a very small waist, broad hips and a well developed rear end. Her measurements ought to have been approximately: 32-23-37. Thighs: heavy and long. Legs: muscular with relatively heavy calves but not fat. Her feet were in good condition with long, straight toes. No corns but heavy calluses on the soles of her feet, as if she had gone barefoot a lot and worn sandals or rubber boots a great deal of the time. She had a lot of hair on her legs, and must have been bare-legged most of the time. Condition of her legs: some defects. She was somewhat knock-kneed and seems to have walked with her toes pointed outward. She had a good deal of flesh on her body but was not fat. Slender arms. Small hands but long fingers. Shoe size was 7.

3 The suntan on her body showed: she had sunbathed in a two-piece bathing suit and worn sunglasses. She had worn thong sandals on her feet.

4 Her sex organ was well developed with a heavy growth of dark hair. Her breasts were small and slack. The nipples were large and dark brown.

5 Rather short neck. Strong features. A large mouth with full lips. Straight, thick, dark eyebrows and lighter eyelashes. Not long. Straight, short nose which was rather broad. No traces of cosmetics on her face. Fingernails and toenails hard and clipped short. No traces of nail polish.

6 In the record of the autopsy (which you have read) I place special attention on the following: She had not had a child and had never had an abortion. The murder had not been committed in connection with any conventional act (no trace of sperm). She had eaten three to five hours before she died: meat, potatoes, strawberries and milk. No traces of sickness or any organic changes. She did not smoke.

I've left a call to be awakened at six o'clock. So long.

Martin Beck read through Kollberg's observations twice before he folded the papers and laid them on his night table. Then he turned off the light and rolled over towards the wall.

It had begun to get light before he fell asleep.

6

The heat was already trembling over the asphalt when they drove away from Motala. It was early in the morning and the road lay flat and empty ahead of them. Kollberg and Melander sat in the front and Martin Beck sat in the back seat with the window down and let the breeze blow on his face. He didn't feel well and it was probably due to the coffee that he had gulped down while he was getting dressed.

‘Kollberg was driving, poorly and unevenly,’ Martin Beck thought, but for once he remained silent. Melander looked blankly out the window and bit hard on the stem of his pipe.

After they had driven silently for about three-quarters of an hour Kollberg nodded his head to the left where a lake could be seen between the trees.

‘Lake Roxen,’ he said. ‘Boren, Roxen and Glan. Believe it or not that's one of the few things I remember from school.’

The others said nothing.

They stopped at a coffee house in Linköping. Martin Beck still didn't feel well and remained in the car while the others had something to eat.

The food had put Melander in a better mood and the two men in the front seat exchanged remarks during the rest of the trip. Martin Beck still remained silent. He didn't want to talk.

When they reached Stockholm he went directly home. His wife was sitting on the balcony sunbathing. She had shorts on and when she heard the front door open she took her brassiere from the balcony railing and got up.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘Terrible. Where are the children?’

‘They took their bikes and went off to swim. You look pale. You haven't eaten properly of course. I'll fix some breakfast for you.’

‘I'm tired,’ said Martin Beck. ‘I don't want anything to eat.’

‘But it will be ready in a second. Sit down and …’

‘I don't want any breakfast. I think I'll sleep for a while. Wake me up in an hour.’

It was a quarter past ten.

He went into the bedroom and closed the door after him.

When she awakened him he thought he had only slept for a few minutes.

The clock showed that it was a quarter to one.

‘I told you one hour.’

‘You looked so tired. Commissioner Hammar is on the telephone.’

‘Oh, damn.’

An hour later he was sitting in his chief's office.

‘Didn't you get anywhere?’

‘No. We don't know a thing. We don't know who she was, where she was murdered, and least of all by whom. We know approximately how and where but that's all.’

Hammar sat with the palms of his hands on the top of the desk, and studied his fingernails and wrinkled his forehead. He was a good man to work for, calm, almost a little slow, and they always got along well together.

Commissioner Hammar folded his hands and looked up at Martin Beck.

‘Keep in contact with Motala. You are most probably right. The girl was on vacation, thought to be away, maybe even out of the country. It might take two weeks at least before anyone misses her. If we count on a three week vacation. But I would like to see your report as soon as possible.’

‘You'll get it this afternoon.’

Martin Beck went into his office, took the cover off his typewriter, thumbed through the papers he had received from Ahlberg, and began to type.

At five-thirty the telephone rang.

‘Are you coming home to dinner?’

‘It doesn't seem so.’

‘Aren't there any other policemen but you?’ said his wife. ‘Do you have to do everything? When do they think you'll see your family? The children are asking for you.’

‘I'll try to get home by six-thirty.’

An hour and a half later his report was finished.

‘Go home and get some sleep,’ said Hammar. ‘You look tired.’

Martin Beck was tired. He took a taxi home, ate dinner and went to bed.

He fell asleep immediately.

At one-thirty in the morning the telephone awakened him.

‘Were you asleep? I'm sorry that I woke you up. I only wanted to tell you that the case has been solved. He turned himself in.’

‘Who?’

‘Holm, the neighbour. Her husband. He collapsed, totally. It was jealousy. Funny, isn't it?’

‘Whose neighbour? Who are you talking about?’

‘The dame in Storängen, naturally. I only wanted to tell you so that you wouldn't lie awake and think about it unnecessarily … Oh, God, have I made a mistake?’

‘Yes.’

‘Damn it, of course. You weren't there. It was Stenström. I'm sorry. I'll see you in the morning.’

‘Nice of you to call,’ said Martin Beck.

He went back to bed but he couldn't sleep. He lay there looking at the ceiling and listening to his wife's mild snoring. He felt empty and depressed.

When the sun began to shine into the room he turned over on his side and thought: ‘Tomorrow I'll telephone Ahlberg.’

He called Ahlberg the next day and then four or five times a week during the following month but neither of them had anything special to say. The girl's origins remained a mystery. The newspapers had stopped writing about the case and Hammar had stopped asking how it was going. There was still no report of a missing person that matched in any way. Sometimes it seemed as if she had never existed. Everyone except Martin Beck and Ahlberg seemed to have forgotten that they had ever seen her.

At the beginning of August, Martin Beck took one week's vacation and went out to the archipelago with his family. When he got back he continued to work on the routine jobs which came to his desk. He was depressed and slept poorly.

One night, at the end of August, he lay in his bed and looked out in the dark.

Ahlberg had called rather late that evening. He had been at the City Hotel and sounded a little drunk. They had talked for a while about the murder and before Ahlberg had hung up, he had said: ‘Whoever he is and wherever he is, we'll get him.’

Martin Beck got up and walked barefooted into the living room. He turned on the light over his desk and looked at the model of the training ship Danmark. He still had the rigging to finish.

He sat down at the desk and took a folder out of a cubbyhole. Kollberg's description of the girl was in the folder together with copies of the pictures that the police photographer in Motala had taken nearly two months ago. In spite of the fact that he practically knew the description by heart he read it again, slowly and carefully. Then he placed the photographs in front of him and studied them for a long time.

When he put the papers back in the folder and turned off the light, he thought: ‘Whoever she was, and wherever she came from, I'm going to find out.’

7

‘Interpol, the devil with them,’ said Kollberg.

Martin Beck said nothing. Kollberg looked over his shoulder.

‘Do those louses write in French too?’

‘Yes. This is from the police in Toulouse. They have a missing person.’

‘French police,’ said Kollberg. ‘I made a search with them through Interpol last year. A little gal from Djursholm section. We didn't hear a word for three months and then got a long letter from the police in Paris. I didn't understand a word of it and turned it in to be translated. The next day I read in the newspaper that a Swedish tourist had found her. Found her, hell. She was sitting in that world-famous cafe where all the Swedish beatniks sit…’

‘Le Dôme.’

‘Yes, that one. She was sitting there with some Arab that she was living with and she had been sitting there every day for nearly six months. That afternoon I got the translation. The letter stated that she hadn't been seen in France for at least three months and absolutely was not there now. In any case, not alive. “Normal” disappearances were always cleared up within two weeks, they wrote, and in this case, unfortunately, one would have to assume some kind of crime.’

Martin Beck folded the letter and placed it in one of his desk drawers.

‘What did they write?’ asked Kollberg.

‘About the girl in Toulouse? The Spanish police found her in Mallorca a week ago.’

‘Why the devil do they need so many official stamps and so many strange words to say so little.’

‘You're right,’ said Martin Beck.

‘Anyway, your girl must be Swedish. As everyone thought from the beginning. Strange.’

‘What's strange?’

‘That no one has missed her, whoever she is. I sometimes think about her too.’

Kollberg's tone changed gradually.

‘It irritates me,’ he said. ‘It irritates me a lot. How many blanks have you drawn now?’

‘Twenty-seven with this one.’

‘That's a lot.’

‘You're right.’

‘Don't think too much about the mess.’

‘No.’

‘Well meant advice is easier to give than to take,’ thought Martin Beck. He got up and walked over to the window.

‘I'd better be getting back to my murderer,’ said Kollberg. 'He just grins and gnashes his teeth. What behaviour! First he drinks a bottle of soda water and then he kills his wife and children with an axe. Then he tries to set fire to the house and cuts his throat with a saw. On top of everything else he runs to the police crying and complains about the food. I'm sending him to the nut house this afternoon.

‘God, life is strange,’ he added and slammed the door after him as he left the room.

The trees between the police station and Kristineberg's Hotel had begun to turn and to lose some of their leaves. The sky lay low and grey with trailing rain curtains and storm-torn clouds. It was the twenty-ninth of September and autumn was definitely on the way. Martin Beck looked distastefully at his half-smoked cigarette and thought about his sensitivity to temperature change and of the six months of winter's formidable colds which would soon strike him.

‘Poor little friend, whoever you are,’ he said to himself.

He was conscious of the fact that their chances were reduced each day that passed. Maybe they would never even find out who she was, not to speak of getting the person who was guilty, unless the same man repeated the crime. The woman who had lain out there on the breakwater in the sun at least had a face and a body and a nameless grave. The murderer was nothing, totally without contours, a dim figure, if that. But dim figures have no desires and no sharp pointed weapons. No strangler's hands.

Martin Beck straightened up. ‘Remember that you have three of the most important virtues a policeman can have,’ he thought. ‘You are stubborn and logical, and completely calm. You don't allow yourself to lose your composure and you act only professionally on a case, whatever it is. Words like repulsive, horrible, and bestial belong in the newspapers, not in your thinking. A murderer is a regular human being, only more unfortunate and maladjusted.’

He hadn't seen Ahlberg since that last evening at the City Hotel in Motala but they had talked on the telephone often. He had spoken to him last week and he remembered Ahlberg's final comment: ‘Vacation? Not before this thing is solved. I'll have all the material collected soon but I'm going to continue even if I have to drag all of Boren myself.’

These days Ahlberg wasn't much more than merely stubborn, Martin Beck thought.

‘Damn, damn, damn,’ he mumbled and rapped his forehead with his fist.

Then he went back to his desk and sat down, swung his chair a quarter turn to the left and stared listlessly at the paper in the typewriter. He tried to remember what it was he wanted to write before Kollberg had come in with the letter from Interpol.

Six hours later, at two minutes to five he had put on his hat and coat and already begun to hate the crowded subway train to the south. It was still raining and he could already perceive both the musty odour of wet clothing and the frightening feeling of having to stand hemmed in by a compact mass of strange bodies.

One minute before five, Stenström arrived. He opened the door without knocking as usual. It was irritating but endurable in comparison with Melander's woodpecker signals and Kollberg's deafening pounding.

‘Here's a message for the department of missing girls. You'd better send a thank you letter to the American Embassy. They sent it up.’

He studied the light red telegram sheet.

‘Lincoln, Nebraska. What was it the last time?’

‘Astoria, New York.’

‘Was that when they sent three pages of information but forgot to say that she was a Negro?’

‘Yes,’ said Martin Beck.

Stenström gave him the telegram and said:

‘Here's the number of some guy at the embassy. You ought to call him.’

With guilty pleasure at every excuse to postpone the subway torture, he went back to his desk but it was too late. The embassy staff had gone home.

The next day was a Wednesday and the weather was worse than ever. The morning paper had a late listing of a missing twenty-five year old housemaid from a place called Räng which seemed to be in the south of Sweden. She had not returned after her vacation.

During the morning registered copies of Kollberg's description and the retouched photographs were sent to the police in southern Sweden and to a certain Detective Lieutenant Elmer B. Kafka, Homicide Squad, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.

After lunch Martin Beck felt that the lymph glands in his neck were beginning to swell and by the time he got home that evening it was hard for him to swallow.

‘Tomorrow the National Police can manage without you, I've decided,’ said his wife.

He opened his mouth to answer her but looked at the children and closed it again without saying anything.

It didn't take her long to take advantage of her triumph.

‘Your nose is completely stopped up. You're gasping for breath like a fish out of water.’

He put down his knife and fork, mumbled ‘thanks for dinner’, and absorbed himself with his rigging problem. Gradually, this activity calmed him completely. He worked slowly and methodically on the model ship and had no unpleasant thoughts. If he actually heard the noise from the television in the next room, it didn't register. After a while his daughter stood on the threshold with a sullen look and traces of bubblegum on her chin.

‘Some guy's on the phone. Wouldn't you know, right in the middle of Perry Mason’

Damn it, he would have to have the telephone moved. Damn it, he would have to start getting involved in his children's upbringing. Damn it, what does one say to a child who is thirteen years old and loves the Beatles and is already developed?

He walked into the living room as if he had to excuse his existence and cast a sheepish look at the great defence lawyer's worn out dogface which filled the television screen. He picked up the telephone and took it out into the hall with him.

‘Hi,’ said Ahlberg. ‘I think I've found something.’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you remember that we spoke about the canal boats which pass here in the summer at twelve-thirty and at four o'clock during the day?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have tried to check up on the small boats and the freight traffic this week. It's almost impossible to do with all the boats that go by. But an hour ago one of the boys on the regular police staff suddenly said that he saw a passenger boat go past Platen's moat in a westerly direction in the middle of the night some time last summer. He didn't know when and he hadn't thought about it until now, when I asked him. He had been doing some special duty in that area for several nights. It seems completely unbelievable but he swore that it was true. He went on vacation the next day and after that he forgot about it.’

‘Did he recognize the boat?’

‘No, but wait. I called Gothenburg and spoke to a few men in the shipping office. One of them said that it certainly could be true. He thought the boat was named Diana and gave me the captain's address.’

A short pause followed. Martin Beck could hear that Ahlberg had struck a match.

‘I got hold of the captain. He said he certainly did remember although he would rather have forgotten it. First they had to stop at Hävringe for three hours because of heavy fog and then a steam pipe in the motor had broken …’

‘Engine.’

‘What did you say?’

‘In the engine. Not the motor.’

‘Oh yes, but in any case they had to stay over more than eight hours in Söderköping for repairs. That means that they were nearly twelve hours late and passed Borenshult after midnight. They didn't stop either in Motala or Vadstena but went directly on to Gothenburg.’

‘When did this happen? Which day?’

‘The second trip after midsummer, the captain said. In other words, the night before the fifth.’

Neither of them said anything for at least ten seconds. Then Ahlberg said:

‘Four days before we found her. I called the shipping office guy again and checked out the time. He wondered what it was all about and I asked him if everyone on board had reached Gothenburg in good order. He said, “Why shouldn't they have?” and I answered that I didn't really know. He must have thought that I was out of my mind.’

It was quiet again.

‘Do you think it means anything?’ Ahlberg said finally.

‘I don't know,’ answered Martin Beck. ‘Maybe. You've done a fine job in any event.’

‘If everyone who went on board arrived in Gothenburg, then it doesn't mean very much.’

His voice was a strange mixture of disappointment and modest triumph.

‘We have to check out all the information,’ Ahlberg said.

‘Naturally.’

‘So long.’

‘So long. I'll call you.’

Martin Beck remained standing a while with his hand on the telephone. Then he wrinkled his forehead and went through the living room like a sleepwalker. He closed the door behind him carefully and sat down in front of the model ship, lifted his right hand to make an adjustment on the mast, but dropped it immediately.

He sat there for another hour until his wife came in and made him go to bed.

8

‘No one could say that you look particularly well,’ said Kollberg. Martin Beck felt anything but well. He had a cold, and a sore throat, his ears hurt him and his chest felt miserable. The cold had, according to schedule, entered its worst phase. Even so, he had deliberately defied both the cold and the home front by spending the day in his office. First of all he had fled from the suffocating care which would have enveloped him had he remained in bed. Since the children had begun to grow up, Martin Beck's wife had adopted the role of home nurse with bubbling eagerness and almost manic determination. For her, his repeated bouts of colds and flu were on a par with birthdays and major holidays.

In addition, for some reason he didn't have the conscience to stay home.

‘Why are you hanging around here if you aren't well?’ said Kollberg.

‘There's nothing the matter with me.’

‘Don't think so much about that case. It isn't the first time we have failed. It won't be the last either. You know that just as well as I do. We won't be any the better or the worse for it.’

‘It isn't just the case that I'm thinking about.’

‘Don't brood. It isn't good for the morale.’

‘The morale?’

‘Yes, think what a lot of nonsense one can figure out with plenty of time. Brooding is the mother of ineffectiveness.’

After saying this Kollberg left.

It had been an uneventful and dreary day, full of sneezing and spitting and dull routine. He had called Motala twice, mostly to cheer up Ahlberg, who in the light of day had decided that his discovery wasn't worth very much as long as it couldn't be connected with the corpse at the locks.

‘I suspect that it is easy to overestimate certain things when you've been working like a dog for so long without results.’

Ahlberg had sounded crushed and regretful. It was almost heartbreaking.

The girl who had disappeared from Räng was still missing. That didn't worry him. She was 5 feet, 1 inch tall, had blonde hair and a Bardot hair style.

At five o'clock he took a taxi home but got out at the subway station and walked the last bit in order to avoid the devastating economic argument which undoubtedly would have followed if his wife had happened to see him get out of a taxi.

He couldn't eat anything but drank a cup of camomile tea. ‘For safety's sake, so that he'd get a stomach ache too,’ Martin Beck thought. Then he went and lay down and fell asleep immediately.

The next morning he felt a little better. He ate a biscuit and drank with stoic calm the cup of scalding hot honey water which his wife had placed in front of him. The discussion about his health and the unreasonable demands that the government placed on its employees dragged on and by the time he arrived at his office at Kristineberg, it was already a quarter past ten.

There was a cable on his desk.

One minute later Martin Beck entered his chief's office without knocking even though the ‘Don't Disturb’ red light was on. This was the first time in eight years he had ever done this.

The ever-present Kollberg and Commissioner Hammar were leaning against the edge of the desk studying a blueprint of an apartment. They both looked at him with amazement.

‘I got a cable from Kafka.’

‘That's a hell of a way to start a work day,’ said Kollberg.

‘That's his name. The detective in Lincoln, in America. He's identified the woman in Motala.’

‘Can he do that by cable?’ asked Hammar.

‘It seems so.’

He put the cable on the desk. All three of them read the text.

THAT'S OUR GIRL ALL RIGHT. ROSEANNA MCGRAW, 27, LIBRARIAN. EXCHANGE OF FURTHER INFORMATION NECESSARY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

KAFKA, HOMICIDE

‘Roseanna McGraw,’ said Hammar. ‘Librarian. That's one you never thought of.’

‘I had another theory,’ said Kollberg. ‘I thought she was from Mjölby. Where's Lincoln?’

‘In Nebraska, somewhere in the middle of the country,’ said Martin Beck. ‘I think.’

Hammar read through the cable one more time.

‘We had better get going again then,’ he said. ‘This doesn't say particularly much.’

‘Quite enough for us,’ said Kollberg. ‘We aren't spoiled.’

‘Well,’ said Hammar calmly. ‘You and I ought to clear up what we're working on first.’

Martin Beck went back to his office, sat down for a moment and massaged his hairline with his fingertips. The first surprised feeling of progress had somehow disappeared. It had taken three months to come up with information that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred you had free from the beginning. All the real work remained to be done.

The embassy people and the County Police Superintendent could wait. He picked up the telephone and dialled the area code for Motala.

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