board. To the stern of the port lifeboat on the shelter deck, Major Jentsch's wife from Osnabr?ck could be seen. Directly below her stood Roseanna McGraw. She was bending forward with her arms resting on the railing and her feet spread apart. She had sandals on, and sunglasses. She wore a full yellow dress with shoulder straps. Martin Beck bent as far over as he could and tried to make out the people standing next to her. At the same time he heard Kollberg whistle through his teeth.
'Oh yes, oh yes,' said the colonel undisturbed. 'This is the ship, here at Riddarholm. There is the City Hall tower. And there is Hildegard Jentsch. That was before we met. And, yes, that was strange. This young girl also sat at our table a few times. She was English or Dutch, I think. They must have moved her to another table later so that we old folks could have a little more room for our elbows.'
A strong, wrinkled index finger, with a lot of white hairs enlarged under the magnifying glass, rested on the girl in the sandals and the loose, yellow dress.
Martin Beck took a breath in order to say something, but Kollberg was quicker.
'What?' asked the colonel. 'Am I certain? Of course I am certain. She sat at the same table as we did at least four or five times. She never said anything though, if I remember correctly.'
'But…'
'Yes, of course your colleague showed me her portrait, but you understand, it wasn't her face that I recognized. It's the dress, or more correctly, not exactly the dress, either.'
He turned to the left and placed his powerful index finger on Martin Beck's chest.
'It was the decollete,' he said in a thundering whisper.
It was a quarter past eleven and they were still sitting in the office at Kristineberg. The breeze was blowing freshly and small drops of rain splashed against the windows.
Twenty photographs were spread out on the table in front of Martin Beck. He had pushed nineteen of them aside and was studying the picture of Roseanna McGraw in the magnifying glass's circle of light for, perhaps, the fiftieth time. She looked just exactly as he had imagined her. Her glance seemed to be directed upward, probably in the direction off Riddarholm's tower. She looked healthy and alert and totally unconscious of the fact that she had only about thirty-sis hours left to live. On her left was cabin number A 7. The door was open but the picture didn't show enough for anyone to see how it looked inside.
'Do you realize that we were lucky today,' said Kollberg. 'It's the first time, too, since we started on this damned case. I One usually has some luck, sooner or later. This time though it was a lot later.'
'We've had some bad luck also.'
'You mean because she was sitting at a table with two deaf old men and three half-blind women? That's not bad luck. That's just the law of averages. Let's go home and go to bed now. I'll drop you off. Or would you rather take that| great gift to humanity, the subway?'
'We have to get a telegram off to Kafka first We can send the rest of it by letter tomorrow.'
They were finished a half hour later. Kollberg drove quickly and carelessly through the rain but Martin Beck didn't I seem nervous, in spite of the fact that driving usually put him in a bad mood. They didn't speak at all during the trip. When they pulled up in front of the house where Martin Beck lived, Kollberg finally said: 'Now you can go to bed and think about all this. So long.'
It was quiet and dark in the apartment but when Martin Beck went past his daughter's room, he heard the sound of radio music. She was probably lying in bed with the transistor radio under her pillow. When he was a boy he had read sea adventure novels with a flashlight under the blankets.
There was some bread and butter and cheese on the kitchen table. He made a sandwich for himself and looked for a bottle of beer in the ice-box. There wasn't any. He stood at the sink, ate his frugal supper, and washed it down with half a glass of milk.
Then he went into the bedroom and got into bed, very carefully. His wife turned toward him, half asleep, and tried to say something. He lay quietly on his back and held his breath. After a few minutes her breath was even and unconscious again. He relaxed, closed his eyes and began to think.
Roseanna McGraw had been in one of the earliest photographs. In addition, these photographs had clearly identified five other people, two retired military couples and the widow Liebeneiner. He could easily expect to receive between twenty-five and thirty more sets of pictures, most of them with more photographs than this one. Each negative would be rooted out, every picture would be studied carefully to find out whom he, or she, knew in each picture. It had to work. Eventually, they could map out Roseanna McGraw's final trip. They should be able to see it in front of them like a film.
A great deal depended on Kafka and what he could obtain from eight households spread across the continent of North America. Americans were wasteful with film. Weren't they known for that? And then, if anyone other than the murderer had been in contact with the woman from Lincoln, wouldn't it very likely have been one of her own countrymen? Maybe they should look for the murderer mainly among the Americans on board. Maybe, one of these days, he would have the telephone pressed against his ear and hear Kafka say: 'Yeah, I shot the bastard.'
In the middle of this thought Martin Beck fell asleep, suddenly, and without trying.
It rained the next day, too, and it was gray and sprinkling. The last yellow leaves of fall stuck sadly to the walls of the house and to the windowpanes.
Almost as if Martin Beck's night-time thoughts had reached him, Kafka sent a laconic telegram:
SEND AS MUCH MATERIAL AS POSSIBLE.
Two days later, Melander, who never forgot anything, took his pipe out of his mouth and said, tranquilly: 'Uli
Mildenberger is in Hamburg. He was there all summer. Would you like to have him examined?'
Martin Beck thought about it for about five seconds. 'No.'
He was on the point of adding: 'Make a note of his address,' but stopped himself at the last minute, shrugged his shoulders and went on with his business.
During these days, he often had very little to do. The case had reached a point where it was going on its own pretty much at the same time as it was spreading itself out all over the globe. There was an open 'hot line' between himself and Ahlberg in Motala. After that, it was spread like the rays of the sun all over the map from the North Cape in the north to Durban in the south and Ankara in the east. By far, the most important line of contact led to Kafka's office in Lincoln, nearly six thousand miles to the west. From there it branched out to a handful of geographically separated places on the American continent.
With so many widespread informants at their disposal, couldn't they ensnare and catch a murderer? The logical answer, unfortunately, was, No. Martin Beck had painful memories from a case involving another sex murder. It had taken place in a cellar in one of the Stockholm suburbs. The body had been found almost immediately and the police arrived on the scene less than an hour later. Several persons had seen the murderer and gave lengthy descriptions of him. The man had left his footprints, cigarette butts, matches, and even several other objects. In addition, he had handled the body with a particularly idiosyncratic perversity. But they had never been able to get him. Their optimism had slowly turned into frustration at their impotence. All the clues had led to nothing. Seven years later, the man was discovered in the act of attempted rape, and arrested. During the examination that followed, he suddenly broke down and admitted the earlier murder.
That crime and its solution seven years later had been only a small incident on the side for Martin Beck. But it had been of the utmost importance to one of his older colleagues. He remembered so well how that man had sat month after month, year after year, in his office late into the night, going through all the papers and rechecking the testimony for the five hundredth, or possibly the thousandth time. He had met that man many times in unexpected places and in surprising circumstances when the man should have been off duty or on vacation but was, instead, always looking for new angles in the case which had become the tragedy of his life. In time, he had become sick and was given his pension early, but even then, he hadn't given up the search. And then, finally, the case was cleared up when someone burst into tears before an astonished policeman down in Halland and confessed to the seven year old crime of strangulation. Martin Beck sometimes wondered if that solution, which came so late, had really given the old detective any peace.
It could happen that way. But that woman in the cellar had been all the things that Roseanna McGraw wasn't, a rootless, wandering person who was hardly a member of society and whose asociability was as
