trace of her came to an abrupt end exactly one week before she was found dead. She had spent the night with a guy in a hotel room on Nybrogatan and parted from him at twelve thirty next day outside a wine bar on Master Samuelsgatan. Period. After that every single Renault CV-4 was tracked down. First in Stockholm, since the witnesses said that the car had an A licence plate. Then every car in the whole country of that make and model was checked, with the idea that it might have had a false licence plate. It took almost a year. And at last it could be proved, actually proved, that not one of all those cars could have stood at Stadshagen at eleven thirty on the evening of 9 June 1951.'
'Hm. And at that moment...' Kollberg said.
'Precisely. At that moment the entire investigation was as dead as a doornail. It was completed. Wound up. The only thing wrong with it was that Teresa Camarao had been murdered and it was not known who had done it. The last twitch of life in the Teresa investigation was in 1952, when the Danish, Norwegian and Finnish police informed us that the damn car could not have come from any of those countries. At the same time the Swedish customs confirmed that it could not have come from anywhere else abroad. As you probably remember, there were not so many cars at that time, and it involved an awful lot of red tape if you wanted to get a motor vehicle across a frontier.'
'Yes, I remember. And these witnesses ...'
'The two in the car were friends from work. One was foreman at a garage and the other a car mechanic. The third witness was also very well informed in the matter of cars. By profession he was - guess.'
'Manager of the Renault factories?'
'No. Police sergeant Specialist in traffic questions. Carlberg his name was - he's dead now. But not even this point was overlooked - we had started trying out witness psychology even then. These three men were made to undergo a series of tests. One at a time they were asked to identify silhouettes of different types of cars, projected on slides. All three recognized every current model, and the foreman even knew the most exotic makes, like Hispano-Suiza and Pegaso. They couldn't even trick him when they drew a car that didn't exist. He said 'the front is a Fiat 500, and the back is from a Dyna Panhard.''
'What did the guys in charge of the investigation think? Privately?' Kollberg asked.
'The inside talk was something like this: The murderer is to be found among all the papers, it's one of the countless men who have slept with Teresa Camarao and who, in a fit of whatever it is that comes over sex maniacs, has strangled her. The investigation has collapsed because someone had bungled over the check-up on all these Renault cars. So let's check them once again. And once again. Then they thought, quite rightly, that after all that time the scent had grown cold. They still thought that at some point or other the run-down of the cars had slipped up and that it was too late to do anything about it. I'm sure that Ek, for instance, who was in on it, thinks so to this day. And on the whole I agree. I can't see any explanation.'
Kollberg sat silent for a while. Then he said, 'What happened to Teresa on that day you mentioned? In May 1949?'
Martin Beck studied the papers and said, 'She received a kind of shock, which led to a psychological phenomenon and a mental and physical state which is comparatively rare but by no means unique. Teresa Camarao had grown up in an upper-middle-class family. Her parents were Catholics like herself. She was a virgin when she married at the age of twenty. She lived for four years together with her husband in a typical Swedish manner, although both were foreigners, and in the environment that was, and is, typical of the comfortable upper middle class. She was reserved, sensible and had a quiet disposition. Her husband considered the marriage a happy one. She was, a doctor says here, a pure product of these two environments, strict Catholic upper class and strict Swedish bourgeoisie, with all the moral taboos inherent in each, to say nothing of the combined result On 15 May 1949, her husband was away on a job in the north. She went to a lecture with a woman friend. There they met a man whom the friend had known for years. He accompanied them back to the Camaraos' apartment on Torsgatan, where the friend was to spend the night, as she too was a grass widow. They had tea and then sat talking about the lecture over a glass of wine. This guy was feeling a bit down because he had been out with a girl - whom incidentally he married not long afterward. He was at a loose end. He thought Teresa was attractive, which she was, and started making a pass at her. The woman friend, who knew that Teresa was the most moral person imaginable, went off to bed - she slept on a sofa in the hall, within earshot. The guy said about a dozen times to Teresa that they should go to bed, but she kept saying no. At last he simply lifted her out of the chair, carried her into the bedroom, undressed her and made love to her. As far as is known, Teresa Camarao had never before shown herself naked to anybody, not even to women. Teresa Camarao had never had an orgasm. That night she had about twenty. Next morning the guy said 'so long', and off he went. She kept calling him up ten times a day for the next week, and after that he never heard from her again. He made it up with his girl and married her, and got on very well. There are a dozen different interrogations with him in this pile. He was really grilled, but he had an alibi and did not have a car; moreover, he was a good, decent guy who was happily married and was never unfaithful to his wife.'
'And Teresa started running about like a bitch in heat?'
'Yes. Literally. She left home, her husband would have nothing more to do with her, and she was dropped by all her friends and acquaintances. For two years she lived for short periods with a score of different men and had sexual relations with ten times as many.
She was a nymphomaniac ready for anything. At first she did it for nothing, but towards the end she did accept money occasionally. Of course, she never met anyone who could put up with her for any length of time. She had no women friends. She tumbled right down the social ladder. Within less than six months the only people she mixed with were those who belonged to what we then called the underworld. She also started drinking. The vice squad knew of her but could never quite keep up with her. They were going to pick her up for vagrancy, but before they could do anything she was dead.'
Pointing to the bundle of reports, Martin Beck went on.
'Among all these papers are a lot of interrogations with men who fell prey to her. They say she never left them alone and was impossible to satisfy. Most of them got scared to death the very first time, especially those who were married and were just out for a bit of fun on the side. She knew a large number of shady characters and semi-gangsters, thieves and con men and black market swindlers and the like. Well, you remember the clientele from that time.'
'What happened to her husband?'
'Not unnaturally, he considered himself scandalized. He changed his name and became a Swedish citizen. Met a girl of good family from Stocksund, remarried, had two children and lived happily ever after in a house of his own on Lindingo. His alibi was as watertight as Captain Cassel's raft.'
'As what?'
'The only thing you know nothing about is boats,' Martin Beck said. 'If you look through that folder you'll understand where Stenstrom got some of his ideas.'
Kollberg looked inside it.
'Jesus Christ! That's the hairiest little broad I've ever seen. Who took these pictures?'
'A man interested in photography who had a perfect alibi and who had nothing to do with a Renault car. But unlike Stenstrom, he sold his pictures at a fat profit As you remember, we didn't have the same profusion of advanced pornography then as we have now.'
They sat silent for a while. At last Kollberg said, 'What possible connection can this have with the fact that Stenstrom and eight other people are shot dead on a bus sixteen years later?'
'None at all,' Martin Beck replied. 'We're simply on our way back to the mentally deranged sensation murderer.'
'Why did he say nothing -'Kollberg began, and broke off.
'Exactly,' Martin Beck said. 'All that is explained now. Stenstrom was going through unsolved cases. As he was very ambitious and still rather naive he picked the most hopeless one he could find. If he solved the Teresa murder it would be a fantastic detective feat And he said nothing to us because he knew that some of us would laugh at him. When he told Hammar he didn't want to tackle anything too old, he had already decided on this. When Teresa Camarao lay in the morgue Stenstrom was twelve and probably didn't even read the newspapers. He considered he could look at it in quite an unbiased way. He combed right through this investigation.'
'And what did he find?'
'Nothing. Because there's nothing to find. There's not one loose thread.'
