The Fire Engine That Disappeared Read online

  The Fire Engine that Disappeared

  MAJ SJÖWALL AND PER WAHLÖÖ

  Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books By

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Let me be completely honest from the outset. When I was invited to write the introduction to The Fire Engine that Disappeared, I somewhat guiltily realized that I had never read a single word written by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. I had frequently read articles about the famous pair, and learnt from many knowledgeable critics that they were among the very finest writers of modern crime fiction. But such literature amounted to little more than books about the books, and not the books themselves; and with me, as with many others, the epithet ‘famous’ more often than not signifies ‘unread’.

  Why was this?

  I really ought to have been more kindly disposed towards the Swedes since they had been the very first nation to translate my own books; and from quite early on I had attended crime conferences in Stockholm and in Göteborg, where my most abiding memory is of the high price of alcohol. But the names of our two authors did not trip off the tongue with the easy familiarity of other foreign crime-writers, like Simenon or Dürrenmatt, and I got to read neither of them. A bigger factor, I am sure, was the view I’ve held for most of my life that the best definition of poetry is ‘what gets lost in translation’; and I have usually assumed (maybe correctly?) that ‘style’ in prose-writing also falls victim to the same potential malaise. And talking of translation and pronunciation, the reader of this novel must occasionally—surely!—feel a little intimidated by such topographical polysyllables as, for example, ‘Karlviksgatan is a street running from Norr Mälarstrand to Hantverkargatan, quite near Fridhemsplan’ (ch. 27). All a bit off-putting, isn’t it? But I took heart from the Sunday Telegraph quote for the blurb: ‘If you haven’t read Sjöwall and Wahlöö, start now.’ So I started, although with considerable clutter in my mind about what to expect.

  My first preconception was that this husband-and-wife team, with a political stance well to the left, had become rather too bitterly critical in the sixties and seventies of what they saw as the betrayal of many of their Socialist ideas and ideals. My second was that their modus scribendi was deeply influenced by the 87th Precinct books of Ed McBain, with real-life crime found predominantly in cities rather than in sleepy English villages. Third, that during these same years, Sweden had become so liberal-minded about sex and sexuality that any sensitive soul might well have to be prepared for (or to hope for) a few paragraphs of explicit titillation.

  Unexpectedly, it was none of these factors that struck me first. What struck me was the gently underplayed humour of the writing. Let me give some examples. An apartment building in Stockholm blows up spectacularly in the opening pages and is burnt to the ground. Melander is one of the investigating team, and the question of the cause of the fire was his particular headache, ‘apart from the fact that he had never had a headache’. Another of the team, and the hero of the rescue attempts, Gunvald Larsson, is being treated in hospital and being dressed in regulation clothing when we find him looking down at his feet ‘inserted into a pair of black, wooden-soled shoes, which either had been made for Goliath, or had been intended as a sign to hang outside some clog-maker’s’. One further example? ‘It took Martin Beck less than thirty seconds to open the door, which was considered a long time, as he had already got the key from the real-estate agent.’ All quite delightful.

  Clearly then we are not going to be confronted by a couple of po-faced Marxists, and the first of my earlier preconceptions is in need of modification. What then am I now to say about any signs of disillusionment with those womb-to-tomb aspirations of what is unsympathetically termed the ‘nanny’ state? I found little or nothing in the novel that could be called tub-thumping propaganda. Instead, I came across a few rather muted and humane reflections on those laudable intentions which somehow had failed to materialize. As early as the first chapter, for example, Martin Beck, on a visit to his mother in an old people’s home, ‘walked past one of the dreary small sitting rooms in which he had never seen anyone sitting, and continued along the gloomy corridor’. All very gentle. Yet we do come across some bitter social commentary, albeit not given any third-person authorial imprimatur, but spoken by the discomfited mother of one of the villains: ‘It’s an accepted fact now that our reform schools and institutions act as a sort of introduction to drug-taking and crime. What you call treatment isn’t worth a cent.’ Pretty polemical!

  My second preconception proved fully corroborated. The influence of the venerable McBain abounds, and this novel is a ‘police procedural’ from the top drawer. What a curious team of detectives we meet, each invested with a sharp individuality, each contributing, well, at least something to the novel’s dramatic dénouement; and, above all, every one of them is interesting as a human being, with their varied responsibilities, and their equally varied wives. Melander, for example, not only possesses a phenomenal memory, he is also a pipe-smoking, unflappable fellow, who has obviously followed a life-long philosophy of never turning round when being shouted at from behind. Martin Beck, who gives his name to the series, plays a comparatively minor role, rather like a cricket-captain who, as the sports pages would report, is having a quiet game. But for me, the most fascinating member of the team is Kollberg, a fat, sedentary figure, to whom I took an instant dislike. He takes much of the limelight, and proves to be a man of strong views and somewhat irrational prejudices, thoroughly detesting one of his colleagues, and steadily digging his own grave with a knife and fork. Yet I finished the book admiring him; and it is the mark of exceptional writing for any author(s) not only to characterize a particular protagonist but to re-characterize him. A good deal of interest, too, settles around a trio of comparatively junior members of the team, who exhibit amusing degrees of inexperience and incompetence during this complex and baffling story. Indeed, one of them is sent on an assignment ‘that might possibly strengthen his leg muscles but was otherwise quite useless’. Yet each of the three plays his part in the unfolding of the story.

  What of my third preconception? Sex plays only a very small part in the novel; and what sex we do find is handled with an almost serene simplicity. The one brief (extraordinarily brief!) incident that I remember with great pleasure occurs when a police contact in Denmark is interviewing, and rather brusquely interviewing, a sculptor in her Copenhagen studio:

  ‘Do you want to sleep with me?’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Månsson. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Good. It’ll be easier to talk afterward.’

  Let me, at last, come to the story—although not too much about the story. The blurbs of some books occasionally, albeit inadvertently, give too many hints about the twists and turns of a plot, sometimes even about the guilty party. Such lapses are irritating, and in the US particularly may provide mines of unwanted and un
necessary information. Why not allow readers to discover for themselves exactly what is going to happen? So let me be brief. We know about the fire already, and it is no secret from the first few pages that we are going to be teased about the respective merits of accident, arson, and wilful murder. Expertly, the theories are juggled in front of our eyes as clues emerge to point the way to shady and deadly dealings in car theft and drugs, with the action shifting eventually from Stockholm down to Malmö in the south and the short crossing to Denmark. It is pleasing, at least for me, to reveal that as the plot develops the reader is not encumbered, as in many crime novels these days, with so much technical forensic detail, often to me unintelligible, that one needs the company of Gray’s Anatomy. Although the autopsies and post-mortems carried out here are of crucial importance, their results are reported with succinct clarity, and no degree in pathology is required to follow them.

  For me, the best criterion of a good read is to wish that it had gone on a bit longer. I felt that here. If I am truthful, I cannot pretend that my life has been unduly influenced by the right-wing Sunday Telegraph—just as the lives of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö would not have been, either. But now I can only feel grateful to the crime critic of that newspaper, upon whose recommendation I have started to read the Martin Beck Series.

  Colin Dexter

  1

  The man lying dead on the tidily made bed had first taken off his jacket and tie and hung them over the chair by the door. He had then unlaced his shoes, placed them under the chair and stuck his feet into a pair of black leather slippers. He had smoked three filter-tipped cigarettes and stubbed them out in the ashtray on the bedside table. Then he had lain down on his back on the bed and shot himself through the mouth.

  That did not look quite so tidy.

  His nearest neighbour was a prematurely retired army captain who had been injured in the hip during an elk hunt the previous year. He had suffered from insomnia after the accident and often sat up at night playing solitaire. He was just getting the deck of cards out when he heard the shot on the other side of the wall and he at once called the police.

  It was twenty to four on the morning of the seventh of March when two radio police broke the lock on the door and made their way into the flat, inside which the man on the bed had been dead for thirty-two minutes. It did not take them long to establish the fact that the man almost certainly had committed suicide. Before returning to their car to report the death over the radio, they looked around the flat, which in fact they should not have done. Apart from the bedroom, it consisted of a living room, kitchen, hall, bathroom and wardrobe. They could find no message or farewell letter. The only written matter visible was two words on the pad by the telephone in the living room. The two words formed a name. A name which both policemen knew well.

  Martin Beck.

  It was Ottilia’s name day.

  Soon after eleven in the morning, Martin Beck left the South police station and went and stood in the line at the off-licence in Karusellplan. He bought a bottle of Nutty Solera. On the way to the metro, he also bought a dozen red tulips and a can of English cheese biscuits. One of the six names his mother had been given at baptism was Ottilia and he was going to congratulate her on her name day.

  The old people’s home was large and very old. Much too old and inconvenient according to those who had to work there. Martin Beck’s mother had moved there a year ago, not because she had been unable to manage on her own, for she was still lively and relatively fit at seventy-eight, but because she had not wanted to be a burden on her only child. So in good time she had secured herself a place in the home and when a desirable room had become vacant, that is, when the previous occupant had died, she had got rid of most of her belongings and moved there. Since his father’s death nineteen years earlier, Martin Beck had been her only support and now and again he was afflicted with pangs of conscience over not looking after her himself. Deep down, inwardly, he was grateful that she had taken things into her own hands without even asking his advice.

  He walked past one of the dreary small sitting rooms in which he had never seen anyone sitting, continued along the gloomy corridor and knocked on his mother’s door. She looked up in surprise as he came in; she was a little deaf and had not heard his discreet tap. Her face lighting up, she put aside her book and began to get up. Martin Beck moved swiftly over to her, kissed her cheek and with gentle force pressed her down into the chair again.

  ‘Don’t start dashing about for my sake,’ he said.

  He laid the flowers on her lap and placed the bottle and can of biscuits on the table.

  ‘Congratulations, Mother dear.’

  She unwound the paper from the flowers and said:

  ‘Oh, what lovely flowers. And biscuits! And wine, or what is it? Oh, sherry. Good gracious!’

  She got up and, despite Martin Beck’s protests, went over to a cupboard and took out a silver vase, which she filled with water from the handbasin.

  ‘I’m not so old and decrepit that I can’t even use my legs,’ she said. ‘Sit yourself down instead. Shall we have sherry or coffee?’

  He hung up his hat and coat and sat down.

  ‘Whichever you like,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll make coffee,’ she said. ‘Then I can save the sherry and offer some to the old ladies and boast about my nice son. One has to save up the cheerful subjects.’

  Martin Beck sat in silence, watching as she switched on the electric hotplate and measured out the water and coffee. She was small and fragile and seemed to grow smaller each time he saw her.

  ‘Is it boring for you here, Mother?’

  ‘Me? I’m never bored.’

  The reply came much too quickly and glibly for him to believe her. Before sitting down, she put the coffee pot on the hotplate and the vase of flowers on the table.

  ‘Don’t you worry about me,’ she said. ‘I’ve got such a lot to do. I read and talk to the other old girls, and I knit. Sometimes I go into town and just look, though it’s awful the way they’re pulling everything down. Did you see that the building your father’s business was in has been demolished?’

  Martin Beck nodded. His father had had a small transport business in Klara and where it had once been, there was now a shopping centre of glass and concrete. He looked at the photograph of his father that stood on the chest of drawers by her bed. The picture had been taken in the mid-twenties, when he himself had been only a few years old and his father had still been a young man with clear eyes, glossy hair with a side-parting, and a stubborn chin. It was said that Martin Beck resembled his father. He himself had never been able to see the likeness, and should there be any, then it was limited to physical appearance. He remembered his father as a straightforward, cheerful man who was generally liked and who laughed and joked easily. Martin Beck would have described himself as a shy and rather dull person. At the time the photograph had been taken, his father had been a construction worker, but a few years later the depression came and he was unemployed for a couple of years. Martin Beck reckoned that his mother had never really got over those years of poverty and anxiety; although they were much better off later on, she had never stopped worrying about money. She still could not bring herself to buy anything new if it were not absolutely necessary, and both her clothes and the few bits of furniture she had brought with her from her old home were worn by the years.

  Martin Beck tried to give her money now and again and at regular intervals he offered to pay the bill at the home, but she was proud and obstinate and wished to be independent.

  When the coffee had boiled, he brought the pot over and let his mother pour it. She had always been solicitous towards her son and when he had been a boy she had never even allowed him to help with the dishes or make his own bed. He had not realized how misdirected her thoughtfulness had been until he had discovered how clumsy he was when it came to the simplest domestic chore.

  Martin Beck watched his mother with amusement as she popped a sugar lump into her
mouth before taking a sip of the coffee. He had never seen her drinking coffee ‘on the lump’ before. She caught his eye and said:

  ‘Ah well, you can take a few liberties when you’re as old as I am.’

  She put down her cup and leaned back, her thin freckled hands loosely clasped in her lap.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Tell me how things are with my grandchildren.’

  Nowadays, Martin Beck was always careful to express himself in nothing but positive terms when he talked to his mother about his children, as she considered her grandchildren cleverer, more brilliant and more beautiful than any other children. She often complained that he did not appreciate their merits and she had even accused him of being an unsympathetic and harsh father. He himself thought he was able to regard his children in a quite sober light and he presumed they were much like any other children. His contact with sixteen-year-old Ingrid was best; a lively, intelligent girl who found things easy at school and was a good mixer. Rolf would soon be thirteen and was more of a problem. He was lazy and introverted, totally uninterested in anything to do with school and did not seem to have any other special interests or talents either. Martin Beck was concerned about his son’s inertia, but hoped it was just his age and that the boy would overcome his lethargy. As he could not find anything positive to say about Rolf at the moment and as his mother would not have believed him if he had told her the truth, he avoided the subject. When he had told her about Ingrid’s latest progress at school, his mother said quite unexpectedly:

  ‘Rolf’s not going into the police force when he leaves school, is he?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Anyhow, he’s hardly thirteen. It’s a little soon to begin worrying about that sort of thing.’

  ‘Because if he wants to, you must stop him,’ she said. ‘I’ve never understood why you were so stubborn about becoming a policeman. Nowadays it must be an even more awful profession than it was when you first began. Why did you join the police force, anyway, Martin?’