The Laughing Policeman

'Bless you,' Kollberg said. 'I very nearly tossed him out of the window.'

Kollberg was about the only one who could have done it, Martin Beck thought. Aloud he said, 'Thanks.' 'What are you thanking me for?' 'For saying 'bless you'.'

'Oh yes. Not many people nowadays have the courtesy to say thank you. I had a case once. A press photographer who beat his wife black and blue and then flung her out in the snow naked because she hadn't thanked him when he said 'bless you'. On New Year's Eve. He was drunk, of course.'

He stood silent for a while, then said doubtfully, 'I doubt if I can get anything more out of her. Asa, I mean.'

'Well, never mind, we know what Stenstrom was working on,' Martin Beck said.

Kollberg gaped at him. 'Do we?'

'Sure. The Teresa murder. Clear as daylight'

'The Teresa murder?'

'Yes. Hadn't you realized that?'

'No,' Kollberg said. 'I hadn't. And I've thought back over everything from the last ten years. Why didn't you say anything?'

Martin Beck looked at him and bit his ball-point pen thoughtfully. They both had the same thought and Kollberg put it into words.

'One can't communicate merely by telepathy.'

'No,' Martin Beck said. 'Besides, the Teresa case is sixteen years old. And you had nothing to do with the investigation. The Stockholm police had charge of it from start to finish. I think Ek is the only one left here from that time.'

'So you've already gone through all the reports?'

'By no means. Only skimmed through them. There are several thousand pages. All the papers are out at Vastberga. Shall we go out and have a look?'

'Yes, let's. My memory needs refreshing.'

In the car Martin Beck said, 'Perhaps you remember enough to realize why Stenstrom took on the Teresa case?'

Kollberg nodded.

'Yes, because it was the most difficult one he could tackle/

'Exactly. The most impossible of all things impossible. He wanted to show what he was capable of, once and for all.'

'And then he went and got himself shot,' Kollberg said. 'Christ, how stupid. And where's the connection?'

Martin made no reply and nothing more was said until, after various difficulties and delays, they had threaded their way out to Vastberga and parked in the sleet outside the southern police headquarters. Then Kollberg said, 'Can the Teresa case be solved? Now?'

'Shouldn't think so for a moment,' Martin Beck replied.

₂₅

Kollberg sighed unhappily, as he listlessly and irrationally turned the pages of the reports piled in front of him.

'It will take a week to wade through all this,' he said.

'At least. Do you know the actual circumstances?

'No, not even in broad outline.'

'There's a resume' somewhere. Otherwise I can give you a rough idea.'

Kollberg nodded. Martin Beck picked out one or two sheets and said, 'The facts are clear-cut. Very simple. Therein lies the difficulty.' 'Fire away,' Kollberg said.

'On the morning of 10 June 1951, that's to say more than sixteen years ago, a man who was looking for his cat found a dead woman in some bushes near Stadshagen sports ground on Kungsholmen here in town. She was naked, lying on her stomach with her arms by her sides. The forensic medical examination showed that she had been strangled and that she had been dead for about five days. The body was well preserved and had evidently been lying in a cold-storage room or something similar. All available evidence pointed to a sex murder, but as such a long time had elapsed, the doctor who did the postmortem could not find any definite signs that she had been sexually assaulted.'

'Which on the whole means a sex murder,' Kollberg said.

‘Yes. On the other hand, the examination of the scene of the crime showed that the body could not have been lying there for more than twelve hours at the most; this was also confirmed later by witnesses, who had passed the shrubbery the previous evening and who could not have helped seeing the body if it had been there then. Further, fibres and textile particles were found indicating that she had been transported there wrapped in a grey blanket It was therefore quite clear that the crime had not been committed in the place where the body was found, and that the body had just been slung into the bushes. Little or no attempt had been made to hide it with the help of moss or branches. Well, that's about all... No, I was forgetting. Two more things: She had not eaten for several hours before she died. And there was no trace of the murderer in the way of footprints or anything.'

Martin Beck turned over the pages and skimmed through the typewritten text.

'The woman was identified the very same day as one Teresa Camarao. She was twenty-six years old and born in Portugal. She had come to Sweden in 1945 and the same year had married a fellow countryman called Henrique Camarao. He was two years older than she and had been a radio officer in the merchant marine but had gone ashore and got a job as radio technician. Teresa Camarao was born in Lisbon in 1925. According to the Portuguese police she came from a good home and a very respectable family. Upper middle class. She had come to study, rather belatedly because of the war. That's as far as her studies got She met this Henrique Camarao and married him. They had no children. Comfortably off. lived on Torsgatan.'

'Who identified her?'

'The police. That's to say the vice squad. She was well known there and had been for the last two years. On 15 May 1949 -circumstances were such that it was in fact possible to determine the exact date - she had completely changed her way of life. She had run away from home - so it says here - and since then she had circulated in the underworld. In short, Teresa Camarao had become a whore. She was a nymphomaniac and during these two years she had gone with hundreds of men.' Yes, I remember,' Kollberg said.

'Now comes the best part of it Within the space of three days the police found no less than three witnesses who, at half-past eleven the evening before, had seen a car parked on Kungsholmsgatan by the approach to the path beside which the body was found. All three were men. Two of them had passed in a car, one of them on foot. The two witnesses who had been driving had also seen a man standing by the car. Beside him on the ground lay an object the size of a body, wrapped in something that seemed to be a grey blanket. The third witness walked past a few minutes later and saw only the car. The descriptions of the man were vague. It was raining and the person had stood in the shade; all that could be said for sure was that it was a man and that he was fairly tall. Pressed for what they meant by tall, they varied between 5 feet 9 and 6 feet 1 inches, which included ninety per cent of the country's male population. But...'

'Yes? But what?'

'But as regards the vehicle, all three witnesses were agreed. Each said that the car was French, a Renault model CV-4, which was put on the market in 1947 and which turned up year after year with no changes to speak of.'

'Renault CV-4,' Kollberg said. 'Porsche designed it while the French kept him prisoner as a war criminal They shut him up in the gatekeeper's house at the factory. There he sat designing. Then, I think, he was acquitted. The French made millions out of that car.'

'You have a staggering knowledge of the most widely differing subjects,' Martin Beck said drily. 'Can you tell me now what connection there is between the Teresa case and the fact that Stenstrom was shot dead by a mass murderer on a bus four weeks ago?'

'Wait a bit,' Kollberg said. ‘What happened then?'

'The police here in Stockholm carried out the most extensive murder investigation ever known in this country. It swelled to gigantic proportions. Well, you can see for yourself. Hundreds of individuals who had known and been in touch with Teresa Camarao were questioned, but it could not be established who had last seen her alive. All