The Laughing Policeman

poisoned wife who kept nagging at him because he didn't earn enough. Because they couldn't afford a motorboat and a summer cottage and a car as upmarket as the neighbours'.'

'But during the interrogations this man said something to Ake.'

'What?'

'I don't know. But it was something he considered very important I asked the same as you, of course, but he only laughed and said I'd soon see.'

'Did he say exactly that?'

''You'll soon see, darling.'' Those were his exact words. He seemed very optimistic.' 'Odd.'

They sat in silence for a while. Then Kollberg shook himself, picked up the open book from the table and said, 'Do you understand these comments?'

Asa Torell got up, walked round the table and put her hand on his shoulder as she looked at the book.

'Wendel and Svensson write that the sex murderer is often impotent and attains abnormal satisfaction from committing a crime of violence. And in the margin Ake has written 'or the reverse'

Kollberg shrugged and said, 'He means, of course, that the sex murderer may also be oversexed.'

She took her hand away suddenly. Looking up at her, he noticed to his surprise that she was blushing again.

'No, he doesn't mean that,' she said.

'Then what does he mean?'

'The very opposite. That the woman - the victim, that is - may lose her life because she is oversexed.' 'How do you know that?'

'Because we once discussed the matter. In connection with that American girl who was murdered on the Gota Canal.' 'Roseanna,' Kollberg said.

He thought for a moment, then said, 'But I hadn't given him this book then. I remember that I found it when I was clearing out my drawers. When we moved from Kristineberg. That was much later.'

'And that other comment of his seems rather illogical,' she said.

‘Yes. Aren't there any pads or diaries in which he used to write things down?'

'Didn't he have his notebook on him?'

'Yes. We've looked at it. Nothing of interest there.'

'I've searched the flat,' she said.

'And what have you found?'

'Nothing much. He wasn't in the habit of hiding things. Besides, he was very tidy. He had an extra notebook, of course. It's over there on the desk.'

Kollberg got up and fetched the notebook. It was of the same type as the one Stenstrom had had in his pocket

'There's hardly anything in that book,' Asa Torell said.

She pulled the ski sock off her right foot and scratched herself under the instep.

Her foot was thin and slender and gracefully arched, with long straight toes. Kollberg looked at it. Then he looked inside the notebook. She was right. There was almost nothing in it The first page was covered with jottings about the poor wretch of a man called Birgersson who had killed his wife.

At the top of the second page was a single word. A name. Morris.

Asa Torell looked at the pad and shrugged.

'A car’ she said.

'Or a literary agent in New York,' Kollberg replied.

She was standing by the table. Her eye caught the much-discussed photographs. Suddenly she slammed her hand down on the table and shouted, 'If at least I'd got pregnant!'

Then she lowered her voice.

'He said we had plenty of time. That we'd wait until he was promoted.'

Kollberg moved hesitantly towards the hall. 'Plenty of time,' she mumbled. And then: 'What's to become of me?' Turning around, he said, 'This won't do, Asa. Come.' Whirling around, she snarled at him, 'Come? Where? To bed? Oh, sure.'

Kollberg looked at her.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand would have seen a pale, thin, undeveloped girl who held herself badly, who had a delicate body, thin nicotine-stained fingers and a ravaged face. Unkempt and dressed in baggy, stained clothes and with one foot covered by a skiing sock many sizes too large.

Lennart Kollberg saw a physically and mentally complex young woman with blazing eyes and a promising width between her thighs, provocative and interesting and worth getting to know.

Had Stenstrom also seen this, or had he been one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine and merely had a stroke of luck?

Luck.

'I didn't mean that,' Kollberg said. 'Come home with me. We have plenty of room. You've been alone long enough.' She was hardly in the car before she started to cry.

₂₂

A cutting wind greeted Nordin as he emerged from the underground at the corner of Sveavagen and Radmansgatan. It was blowing from behind him and he walked briskly south along Sveavagen. When he turned into Tegnergatan he was sheltered and slowed his steps. About twenty yards from the street corner lay a cafe He stopped outside the window and peered in.

Behind the counter sat a red-haired woman in a pistachio-green uniform, talking on the phone. The cafe was otherwise empty.

Nordin walked on, crossed Luntmakargatan and regarded an oil painting that was hanging inside the glass door of a secondhand bookshop. While he stood puzzling as to whether the artist had meant the picture to represent two elks, two reindeer or perhaps an elk and a reindeer, he heard a voice behind him.

'Aber Mensch, bist Du doch ganz verruckt?’

Nordin turned around and saw two men crossing the street Not until they reached the pavement on the other side did he see the cafe. When Nordin entered, the two men were on their way down a curving staircase beyond the counter. He followed them.

The place was full of young people and the music and the buzz of voices were deafening. He looked around for a vacant table, but there didn't seem to be one. For a moment he wondered whether he ought to take off his hat and coat, but decided not to risk it. You couldn't trust anyone in Stockholm, he was convinced of that.

Nordin studied the female guests. There were several blondes in the room but none who fitted the description of Blonde Malin.

German seemed to be the predominant language. Beside a thin brunette, who was obviously Swedish, there was a vacant chair. Nordin unbuttoned his coat and sat down. Put his hat in his lap, thinking that his coat of lodencloth and his Tyrolean hat probably made him look a good deal like one of the many Germans there.

He had to wait a quarter of an hour before the waitress came up to him. Meanwhile he looked about him. The brunette's girlfriend on the other side of the table eyed him guardedly from time to time.

He stirred his cup of coffee and stole a glance at the girl in the chair next to him. In the faint hope of being taken for a regular customer he took pains to utter the words in the Stockholm dialect when he turned to her and said, 'Do you know where Blonde Malin is this evening?'

The brunette stared at him. Then she smiled, bent over the table and said to her girlfriend, 'Eva, this guy from the north is asking after Blonde Malin. Do you know where she is?'

The friend looked at Nordin, then she called to someone at a table farther off. 'There's a cop here who's asking where Blonde Malin is. Do any of you know?'

'No-o-o,' came a chorus from the other table.

As Nordin sipped his coffee he wondered gloomily how they could see he was a policeman. He couldn't make these Stockholmers out.

When he had mounted the stairs to the shop floor where the pastries were sold, the waitress who had brought his coffee came up to him.

'I heard you're looking for Blonde Malin,' she said. 'Are you really a policeman?'

Nordin hesitated. Then he nodded lugubriously.