By seven o'clock on Wednesday morning the hunt had died down. Haggard and hollow-eyed policemen stumbled home for a few hours sleep, others dropped like felled trees onto sofas and wooden benches in the guardrooms and dayrooms of the various stations.
Scores of people were found that night, in the most surprising places, but none of them was called Ingemund Rudolf Fransson.
At seven o'clock Kollberg and Martin Beck were at headquarters at Kungsholmsgatan. By now they were so tired that they were past feeling it and had got their second wind, as it were.
Kollberg was standing with his hands behind his back in front of the big map on the wall.
'He was a gardening laborer,' he said. 'Employed by the local council He worked for eight years in the city parks, he must have got to know them all during that time. And up to now he hasn't gone outside the actual city limits. He keeps to ground he knows.'
'If only we could be sure,' Martin Beck said.
'One thing is certain. He didn't sleep in any park last night. Not in Stockholm.'
Kollberg paused and said reflectively:
'Unless we've had goddam bad luck.'
'Exactly,' Martin Beck said. 'Besides, there are enormous areas that just can't be checked effectively at night. Djurgarden, Gardet, Lill-Jans Wood… to say nothing of the districts outside the city.'
'The Nacka reserve,' Kollberg,said.
'The cemeteries,' Martin Beck said.
'Yes, the cemeteries… They're locked, it's true, but…'
Martin Beck looked at the clock.
'The immediate question is: what does he do in the daytime?'
'That's what is so fantastic,' Kollberg said. 'He evidently walks around town quite openly.'
'We've got to pull him in today,' Martin Beck said. 'Anything else is unthinkable.'
'Yes,' Kollberg said.
The psychologists were on the alert and came forward with the view that Ingemund Fransson was not deliberately trying to hide or keep out of the way. He was probably in a state of nonconsciousness but acted, also unconsciously, in an intelligent way and with automatic instinct of self-preservation.
'Very enlightening,' Kollberg said.
A little later Gunvald Larsson arrived. He had been working independently and along lines of his own.
'Do you know how far I've driven since last evening? Three hundred and forty kilometers. In this goddam city. And slowly. I think he must be some kind of spook.'
'That's one way of looking at it,' Kollberg said.
Melander also had a point of view.
'The systematics disturb me. He commits one murder and then another almost immediately afterwards, then there's an interval of eight days, then a new murder and now…'
All had points of view.
The public was hysterical and panic-stricken and the police force overworked.
The general review of the situation on Wednesday morning had an air of optimism and confidence. On the surface. Deep down inside each man was just as afraid as the next.
'We need more men,' Hammar said. 'Get every available man from the outlying districts. Many will volunteer.'
And plainclothes men, that was a recurrent theme. Plain-clothes police in key places; everyone who had a track suit or old overalls was to take himself out into the bushes.
'We must have a lot of uniformed men on patrol,' Martin Beck said. 'To reassure the public. To give them a sense of security.'
Thinking of what he had just said, he was overcome by a bitter feeling of hopelessness and helplessness.
'Compulsory proof of identity in all liquor stores,' Ham-mar said.
That was a good idea, but it did not lead to any results.
Nothing seemed to lead anywhere. The hours of Wednesday dragged past. A dozen or so alarms were received but none of them seemed very hopeful and all turned out in fact to be false.
Evening came, and a chilly night. The raids continued.
Nobody slept. Gunvald Larsson drove another three hundred kilometers at 46 ore a kilometer.
'The dogs are groggy too,' he said when he came back. 'They're even past biting policemen.'
The morning of Thursday the twenty-second of June gave prospects of a warm but windy day.
'I'm going up to Skansen to stand there disguised as a maypole,' Gunvald Larsson said.
No one had the energy to answer him. Martin Beck felt sick and his stomach heaved. When he tried to hold the paper mug to his lips his hand shook so much that he spilled coffee on Melander's blotting paper. And Melander, who was otherwise very finicky, didn't even seem to notice.
Melander was also unusually grave. He was thinking of the timetable. The timetable which showed that it was almost time for the next.
At two o'clock in the afternoon release came at last. In the form of a telephone call. Ronn answered.
'Where? In Djurgarden?'
Putting his hand over the mouthpiece, he looked at the others and said:
'He's in Djurgarden. Several persons have seen him.'
'If we're lucky he's still in South Djurgarden, and then we've got him cornered,' Kollberg said in the car as they drove east, closely followed by Melander and Ronn.
South Djurgarden is an island and to get there one must cross one of the two bridges across Djurgardsbrunnsviken and the canal, unless one takes the ferry or has a boat of one's own. On the third of the island nearest to the center of town are museums, the amusement park of Grona Lund, summer restaurants, motorboat and yacht clubs, Skansen's open-air museum and zoo, and the residential district, like a small village, known as Gamla Djurgardsstaden. The rest of its area is covered with cultivated parkland interspersed with woods. The buildings are old but well preserved: manor houses, mansions, dignified villas and small eighteenth-century wooden houses dotted about, all surrounded by beautiful gardens.
Melander and Ronn turned off onto the Djurgarden bridge while Kollberg and Martin Beck drove straight on to the Djurgarden Inn. A few police cars were already drawn up in front of the restaurant.
The bridge over the canal was cordoned off by a radio patrol car and on the other side they saw another police car driving slowly in the direction of the Manilla deaf and dumb school.
A small cluster of people stood at the north end of the bridge. As Martin Beck and Kollberg approached, an elderly man detached himself from the group and went up to them.
'I take it you're the superintendents,' he said.
They stopped and Martin Beck nodded.
'My name's Nyberg,' the man went on. 'I was the one who discovered the murderer and called the police.'
'Where did you find him?' Martin Beck asked.
'Below Grondal. He was standing in the road looking up at the house. I recognized him at once from the picture and description in the papers. At first I didn't know what to do, whether to try and nab him, but as I got closer I heard him talking to himself. It sounded so odd that I knew he must be dangerous, so I walked up to the inn as quietly -as possible and phoned the police.'
'Talking to himself, was he,' Kollberg remarked. 'Did you hear what he said?'
'He stood there saying he was ill. He expressed himself in a very funny way, but that's what he said. That he was ill. When I'd phoned I went back but he had gone. Then I kept watch here by the bridge until the police came.'
Martin Beck and Kollberg went on down to the bridge and spoke to the radio policemen.
The man had been seen by several witnesses between the canal and Manilla, and the witness at Grondal was obviously the last one to have seen him. As the area had been cordoned off so quickly there was every reason to believe that the man was still in South Djurgarden. No bus had crossed the bridge after the witness saw the man at Grondal. The roads into town had been closed immediately and the man could hardly have got as far as Skansen or
