The Man on the Balcony

were attached to straps diagonally across their chests and they carried pistols and truncheons. Their dress was due to the fact that they felt cold as soon as the temperature dropped below 70°.

They were both from the province of Skane, in the far south.

Both were six foot two and had blue eyes. Both were broad-shouldered and fair-haired and weighed about 180 pounds. They drove a black Plymouth with white mudguards. It had a searchlight and radio mast a rotating orange flash light and two red lights on the roof. In addition, the word POLICE was painted in white block letters on four places: over the doors, on the hood and across the back. Kristiansson and Kvant were radio police. Before joining the force they had -both been regular sergeants in the South Skane Infantry Regiment at Ystad. Both were married and each had two children. They had worked together for a long time and knew each other as well as only two men in a radio car can do. They! applied for transfer at the same time and got on badly with* everyone except each other.

Yet they were not really alike and they often got on each other's nerves. Kristiansson was gentle and conciliatory, Kvant hot-tempered and truculent. Kristiansson never mentioned his wife, Kvant talked of hardly anything else but his. By this tune Kristiansson knew everything about her; not only what she said and did, but the most intimate details regarding her body and general behavior.

They were regarded as complementing each other perfectly.

They had pulled in many thieves and thousands of drunks and they had put a stop to hundreds of apartment rows; Kvant had even started a few rows himself, since he took it for granted that people always got noisy and troublesome when they suddenly found two policemen standing in their hall.

They had never made a spectacular scoop of any kind or had then- names in the papers. Once, while serving in Malmo, they had driven a drunken journalist, who was murdered six months later, to the casualty department of the hospital. He had cut his wrists. This was the nearest they had ever come to fame.

The radio car was their second home, with its faint reek of liquor fumes left by all the drunks and with its atmosphere, hard to define, of stale intimacy.

Some people thought they were stuck-up because they spoke with a Skane accent, and they themselves were annoyed when certain persons with no feeling for the sound and quality of the dialect tried to mimic them.

Kristiansson and Kvant did not even belong to the Stockholm police. They were radio police in Solna, outside the city boundary, and knew very little more about the park murders than what they had read in the papers and heard on the radio.

Soon after half past two on Thursday the twenty-second of June they were right in front of the military academy at Karlberg, with only twenty minutes of their shift to go.

Kristiansson, who was at the wheel, had just reversed the car on the old parade ground and was now driving westwards along Karlberg Strand.

'Stop a moment,' Kvant said.

'Why?'

'I want to have a look at that boat.'

After a while Kristiansson said with a yawn:

'Had a good look?'

'Yes.'

They drove on slowly.

'The park murderer has been caught,' Kristiansson said. 'They've got him surrounded at Djurgarden.'

'So I heard,' Kvant said.

'Good thing the kids are down in Skane.'

'Yes. Funny thing, you know…'

He broke off. Kristiansson said nothing.

'Funny thing,' Kvant went on. 'Before I married Siv I was always after the girls. One chick after the other, couldn't stop. Virile, as they say. In fact, I was goddam randy.'

'Yes, I remember,' Kristiansson said, yawning.

'But now—why, now I feel like an old horse that's been put out to graze. Fall dead asleep the minute I get into bed. And all I think of when I wake up is cornflakes and milk.'

He made a short, pregnant pause and added:

'Must be old age creeping on.'

Kristiansson and Kvant had just turned thirty.

'Yes,' Kristiansson said

He drove past Karlberg bridge and was now only twenty-five yards from the city boundary. Had the park murderer not been surrounded at Djurgarden he would probably have swung up to the right to Ekelundsvagen and had a look at what was left of the woods there after the new apartment houses had gone up. But there was no reason to now, and anyway he'd rather not see the National Police College twice in the same day if he could help it So he continued westwards along the winding road by the water.

They drove past Talludden and Kvant looked sourly at the teenagers hanging about outside the cafe and around the cars in the parking lot.

'By rights we ought to stop and take a look at their goddam rattletraps.'

'That's the traffic boys' headache,' Kristiansson said. 'We're due back at the station in fifteen minutes.'

They sat for a while in silence.

'Good thing they've pulled in that sex maniac,' Kristiansson said.

'If only you could once say something I haven't heard twenty times already.'

'It's not so easy.'

'Siv was in a stinking temper this morning,' Kvant said. 'Did I tell you about that lump she thought she had on her left breast? The one she thought might be cancer?'

'Yes, you did.'

'Oh. Well, anyway, I thought now she's been nagging so | long about that lump so I'll have a good feel myself. She was lying there like a dead fish when the alarm went off and of course I woke up before she did. So I…'

'Yes, you told me.'

They had come to the end of Karlberg Strand, but instead of turning up towards the Sundbyberg road—which was the shortest way to the police station—Kristiansson drove straight on and along Huvudsta Alle, a road seldom used by anybody nowadays.

Later, many people were to ask him why he took that particular road, but that was a question he could not answer. He ] just took it, and that was that. In any case, Kvant did not; react. He had been a radio policeman far too long to ask useless questions. Instead, he said thoughtfully:

'No, I just can't make out what has got into her. Siv, I mean.'

They passed Huvudsta Castle.

Not much of a castle, come to that, Kristiansson thought | for perhaps the five-hundredth time. At home in Skane there are real castles. With counts and barons in them. Aloud he; said:

'Can you lend me twenty kronor?'

Kvant nodded. Kristiansson was chronically short of money.

They drove slowly on. To the right lay a newly built residential area with tall apartment houses, to the left was a narrow but densely wooded strip of land between the road and the Ulvsunda Lake.

'Stop a minute,' Kvant said.

'Why?'

'Call of nature.'

'We're nearly there.'

'Can't be helped.'

Kristiansson turned left and let the car glide slowly into one of the clearings. Then he stopped. Kvant got out and walked around the car, over to some low bushes, placed his legs wide apart and whistled as he pulled down the zipper of his fly. He looked over the bushes. Then he turned his head and saw a man standing only five or six yards away, evidently on the same business as himself.

'Sorry,' Kvant said, turning politely the other way.

He adjusted his clothes and went towards the car. Kristiansson had opened the door and sat there looking