custody.'
'What about him?'
'He hasn't been out since last Wednesday, when he brought home a lot of drink, mostly wine. He went from one liquor store to another.'
'And then?'
'We caught a glimpse of him now and again in the window. He looked like a ghost, the boys said. But there hasn't been a sign of him since yesterday morning.'
'Have you rung the doorbell?'
'Yes. He won't open the door.'
Martin Beck had almost forgotten the man. Now he remembered the furtive, miserable eyes, the trembling, emaciated hands. He felt a chill spread over his body.
'Break in,' he said.
'How?'
'Any way you like.'
Putting down the phone, he sat with his head in his hands. No, he thought, not this on top of everything else.
Half an hour later Hansson called up again.
'He had turned the gas on.'
'And?'
'He's on the way to hospital now. Alive.'
Martin Beck sighed. With relief, as they say.
'Though only just,' Hansson said. 'He had done it very neatly. Sealed up the cracks around the doors and stuffed up the keyholes of both front door and kitchen door.'
'But tell be an right?'
'Yes, thanks to the usual. The slugs in the meter gave out But if he'd been left to lie there any longer…'
Hansson left the rest of the sentence unsaid.
'Had he written anything?'
'Yes. 'I can't go on.' He had scrawled it on the edge of an old girlie magazine. I've notified the temperance board.'
'It should have been done before.'
'Well, he did his job all right,' Hansson replied.
After a moment or two he added:
'Until you picked him up.'
Several hours of this horrible Monday still remained. At about eleven in the evening Martin Beck and Kollberg went home. Gunvald Larsson too. Melander stayed on. Everyone knew that he loathed having to be up all night and that the mere thought of giving up his ten hours' sleep was a nightmare to him, but he himself said nothing and his expression was as stoical as ever.
Nothing had happened. Many women called Andersson had been interviewed, but none of them had made the now-famous phone call.
No more bodies had been found and all the children reported missing during the day had turned up safely.
Martin Beck walked to Fridhemsplan and took the subway home.
They had got through the day. It was over a week now since the last murder. Or rather the latest one.
He felt like a drowning man who has just found a foothold but who knows that it's only a respite. That in a few hours it will be high tide.
25
IT WAS EARLY in the morning of Tuesday the twentieth of June and in the guardroom of ninth district police station things were still quiet. Police Officer Kvist sat at a table smoking and reading the paper. He was a young man with a fair beard. From behind the partition in the corner came the murmur of voices, interrupted now and then by the clatter of a typewriter. A telephone rang. Kvist looked up from his paper and saw Granlund lift the receiver inside the glass cage.
The door behind him opened and Rodin came in. He stopped inside the door and fastened his belt and shoulder strap. He was a good bit older than Kvist, both in years and length of service. Kvist had finished his training at the police school the year before and been transferred to ninth district quite recently.
Rodin went up to the table and picked up his cap. He slapped Kvist on the shoulder.
'Well, chum, let's go. We'll do one more round, then have coffee.'
Kvist stubbed out his cigarette and folded up the paper.
They went out the main door and started walking westwards along Surbrunnsgatan. Slowly side by side, with equally long steps and hands behind their backs.
'What was it Granlund said we were to do with that Andersson woman if we found her?' Kvist asked.
'Nothing. Ask if she was the one who called up headquarters on the second of June and blathered about a man on a balcony,' Rodin said. 'Then we were to call Granlund.'
They passed Tulegatan and Kvist looked up towards Vanadis Park.
'Were you up there after the murder?' he asked.
'Yes,' Rodin said. 'Weren't you?'
'No, it was my day off.'
They walked on in silence. Then Kvist said:
'I've never found a body. It must have looked horrible.'
'Don't worry, you'll see a lot of them before you're through.'
'What made you join the police?' Kvist asked.
Rodin did not answer at once. Seemed to think it over. Then he said:
'My dad was a policeman. It seemed natural for me to be one too, though mom wasn't too happy about it, of course. And you? What made you want to be a cop?'
'To do something for the good of the community,' Kvist said.
He gave a laugh and went on:
'At first I didn't know what I wanted to do. I had only Bs in my school-leaving report, but I met a guy in the army when I was doing my national service who was going to be a policeman and he said that my grades were good enough to get me into the police school. Also, there's a shortage of men in the force and… well, anyway, he talked me into it.'
'The pay's pretty lousy,' Rodin said.
'Oh, I dunno,' Kvist said. 'I got fourteen hundred kronor a month at training pay and now I'm up in the ninth salary grade.'
'Yes, it's a bit better now than when I started.'
'I read somewhere,' Kvist said, 'that the police force is recruited out of the twenty percent that does not go to trade schools or university, and that many of that twenty percent do as you did, take the same job as their fathers. It just so happened that your father was a policeman.'
'Yes. But I damn well wouldn't have taken the same job if he'd been a garbage man,' Rodin said.
'They say that there are at least fifteen hundred jobs vacant all over the country,' Kvist said. 'So, no wonder we have to do so much overtime.'
Rodin kicked aside an empty beer can lying on the sidewalk and said:
'You sure are up on statistics. Do you intend to become commissioner?'
Kvist laughed, slightly embarrassed.
'Oh, I just read an article about it But maybe it's not a bad idea to be commissioner. What do you think he earns?'
'Well, you ought to know, with all your reading.'
They had reached Sveavagen and the conversation flagged.
By the newsstand at the corner, outside the liquor store, stood a couple of distinctly drunken men, pushing each other. One of them kept shaking his fist and trying to strike the second man, but was evidently too drunk to succeed. The other man appeared slightly more sober and kept his antagonist at bay by pushing the flat of his hand
