The Man on the Balcony Read online

  MAJ SJÖWALL

  AND PER WAHLÖÖ

  The Man on the Balcony

  Translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair

  This is for Barbara and Newton

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  A man sits on a balcony and watches. A woman watches the man through a pair of binoculars and phones the police.

  That is how the novel starts. I first read The Man on the Balcony nearly forty years ago. I stumbled across the earlier titles in the Martin Beck series of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in my public library. The library was housed in a converted wartime Nissen hut in a small grey town surrounded by a flat, windswept landscape composed largely of black mud and sugar beet. The air inside the hut was a chilly fug smelling of wet raincoats and decaying paper. The librarian was a mournful tweed-covered teddy bear with a matching moustache. Several ladies, grey, plumply corseted and uniformly stern, served as the Gestapo of the establishment, and probably bullied their titular superior as much as they did the borrowers.

  As a young teenager, I browsed indiscriminately and greedily. I was often drawn to the yellow jackets of the Gollancz crime list, which was how I found Sjöwall and Wahlöö. Their names were alien and unpronounceable but my elder sister said they were good, so I gave the books a try. A detective story, I thought, must be always a detective story, wherever it came from.

  How wrong I was. I soon realized that the novels of Sjöwall and Wahlöö were a world away from the Anglo-American competition, most of which was set either in the sedate precincts of Mayhem Parva, where the blood always washed out of the Vicarage carpet, or in the almost equally cosy environs of a large American city, where law and order was in the hands of a heroic private investigator with a penchant for wisecracking and an unlimited capacity for whiskey.

  There was nothing heroic about these books from Sweden. They revealed a strange and uncomfortable place where it was no longer possible to pretend that crime was cosy. They weren't really detective stories, either, or not in the sense I was used to. These were novels about crimes and criminals, detectives and ordinary people. Indeed, they were about crimes whose existence, in some cases, I had not even suspected.

  Surely the tweedy teddy bear and the Gestapo ladies could not have been aware of the dangerous contents of these books? This was only a few years after the Lady Chatterley trial. I had already managed to read enough of Lady Chatterley's Lover to realize that the fictional universe of Sjöwall and Wahlöö was far more subversive than that of D. H. Lawrence.

  Sjöwall and Wahlöö introduced me at an impressionable age to paedophiles, psychopaths, prostitutes, alcoholics, drug addicts, muggers and burglars – here, it seemed, was the sad detritus of humanity. Here too were the police, fallible both as human beings and investigators. As detectives, they groped towards the truth through a fog of ignorance; when they were successful, it was due to hard work and luck rather than forensic brilliance or heroic feats. Above all there was a sense that crime, investigation and punishment were in some fundamental but incomprehensible way linked to the society in which they occurred. Sjöwall and Wahlöö were describing what I should eventually discover was the real world.

  Frankly I didn't like it. It was too real for me, too much like the Nissen hut and the smell of wet raincoats and the officious library assistants. At the time, I much preferred Mayhem Parva.

  * * *

  But time moved on, and so did I. Nearly twenty years later I was making my living by writing my own crime novels, plugging the financial cracks with occasional freelance work for publishers. One of the latter assignments was to advise a crime editor who was considering reissuing selected titles from the Gollancz backlist that extended backwards for half a century. I read – or re-read – with a cynical and essentially professional eye. It was an interesting process, not least because it revealed so much about the changes in crime writing over the years. The puzzle mystery, for example, once the mainstay of the genre, had not worn well, and amateur detectives with amusing personal habits and substantial private incomes were now an endangered species. Most of the books I read could be rejected with a clear conscience.

  Then I came to the novels of Sjöwall and Wahlöö. I was struck at once by their enduring quality, and in particular by the combination of relevance and timelessness that is the mark of good fiction. I realized at once that these were more than crime novels: their authors were, quite consciously, using the police procedural to describe and analyse what was, for them, contemporary society; furthermore, their conclusions could be applied to other cities, and other times.

  I still have copies of the enthusiastic reports I wrote. Here was part of my assessment of The Man on the Balcony: ‘The sheer nastiness of it all – of police work in particular and city life in general – comes over very clearly. The themes are obvious, though never overstated: that we are all responsible for crime, since it is a product of the society we have created; and that the police have an ambivalent attitude towards the society they exist to protect.’

  Elsewhere I wrote: ‘On the surface the book is a sort of minimalist police procedural … it is also an excellent novel. The characters are wholly credible, both personally and professionally. The drab Swedish setting is unobtrusively vivid (if that isn't a contradiction in terms). The authors slyly upset our preconceptions about police, crime and criminals – and, by extension, about the nature of the society that engenders them.’

  Nowadays we take for granted the availability in English translation of so much excellent Scandinavian crime fiction, from Henning Mankell to Arnaldur Indridason to Gunnar Staalesen. Modern readers have come to relish the sociological perspectives it offers. But even the best examples of it make Sjöwall and Wahlöö's achievement seem still more impressive.

  When I first read The Man on the Balcony, I had no idea that the series had been planned as a whole, or that the authors had chosen to use the crime novel because, as a literary form, it offered them a unique mechanism for exploring the relationship between the individual and society. By definition, crime novels deal with law-breaking. Laws are the products of their political, economic and cultural contexts; and those who break laws – and uphold them – are constantly both investigating their nature and testing their validity. Sjöwall and Wahlöö, who worked together on the books and wrote alternate chapters, were Communists, and clearly their critique of Swedish society is from a Marxist viewpoint. Fortunately for us, they were also gifted writers, and their novels transcend narrow political philosophy. Taken as a whole, the series is notable for its variety of tone, plot and motivation; it also has moments of surreal comedy.

  In terms of fictional chronology, The Man on the Balcony is the third title in the se
ries. As a police procedural, its debt to Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels is obvious. The book's narrative is filtered almost entirely through the team of investigating officers. Martin Beck, now a superintendent, is in operational charge of the case. There are many familiar faces – Inspector Gunvald Larsson, a man whose hearty conviction of his own worth constantly grates on his colleagues; the pipe-smoking Menander with his photographic memory and his need to spend time in the lavatory; Kollberg, the portly former paratrooper who hates violence and refuses to carry a gun, and who in this novel is on the verge of becoming a father for the first time; the delicate Einar Ronn, who's nursing a cold; and Kristiansson and Kvant, the bone-headed patrolmen who pop in and out of the series with the grisly inevitability of a pair of Shakespearean grave-diggers. These are flawed and inconsistent human beings, and much of the authority of both this book and of the series as a whole derives from the fact that the recurring characters are so entirely credible.

  It is June 1967 – Sjöwall and Wahlöö are always precise about time and place, true to their journalistic training, just as they are about police procedure. It's shaping up to be a quiet summer in Stockholm, apart from a mugger who, with insolent efficiency, is robbing defenceless citizens in the city's parks and defying police attempts to catch him. Then Martin Beck's tranquillity is ruined when a couple of drunks stumble on the corpse of a nine-year-old girl in one of the parks; she has been sexually assaulted and strangled. Two days later the killer strikes again with the same ‘somnambulist certainty’. The only people who might be witnesses are the mugger, whom no one can catch, and a three-year-old boy whom no one can understand. The teeming anonymity of the city hampers the investigation at every turn. The detectives make forays into a grim and degraded underworld of criminals and losers, a place where in a sense everyone is a victim.

  The police have ambivalent feelings towards the citizens they are paid to protect. Sometimes, one senses, they prefer uncomplicated criminals to so-called law-abiding citizens. Respectable ‘family men’, for example, form a vigilante group to hunt for the killer. Two of them attack Kollberg in a park, and are outraged when he arrests them.

  Martin Beck overhears a man holding forth in a tobacconist's: ‘ … do you know what they ought to do when they catch this bastard? They ought to execute him in public, they should show it on TV, and they shouldn't do it all at once. No, bit by bit, for several days.’ When the man has left, Beck asks who he is. ‘His name's Skog,’ the tobacconist replies. ‘He has the radio workshop next door. Decent chap.’

  Decent chaps and family men get their information from the media, which supply their readers and viewers with ‘juicy descriptions’ of the murders in a socially sanctioned pornography of violence. Brutality is omnipresent and casual. It is hardly worthy of note when, in the course of a police raid, ‘a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl was found naked in an attic. She had taken fifty preludin pills and been raped at least twenty times.’

  The murderer is eventually caught through a series of trivial events. A police officer remembers a scribble on a telephone directory. A second wants to buy cakes to go with his coffee. A third has a pressing need to urinate before he goes off shift.

  It is curious how little the series has dated. The Man on the Balcony could almost have been written yesterday. The reader hardly notices that computers are in their infancy, there are no mobile phones, and genetic fingerprinting hasn't yet been invented. (Only the smoking sticks out. Everyone seems to do a great deal of it, including Beck himself; and his wife thinks he's smoking too much on the grounds of cost as much as health.)

  There are two reasons for this oddly contemporary quality. One is that the setting is instantly familiar in its essentials: Western cities and the crimes they spawn have changed in forty years, but only in degree, not in kind.

  The second reason is that the characters think, speak and act in a way that is instantly and sometimes painfully recognizable. Kollberg loves his heavily pregnant wife but is attracted to a sexually liberated student – until he realizes that the woman reminds him of a corpse he once fancied. Ronn, not the brightest of policemen, simply forgets to mention a vital alibi for a suspect. Larsson – in one of the many moments of unexpected comedy -interrogates a teenage girl about her underwear in the hearing of her middle-class father. A woman watches a man on a balcony because she is in pain and has nothing better to do.

  And the man on the balcony watches a nine-year-old girl in a short blue skirt.

  Andrew Taylor

  1

  At a quarter to three the sun rose.

  An hour and a half earlier the traffic had thinned out and died away, together with the noise of the last night revellers on their way home. The street-sweeping machines had passed, leaving dark wet strips here and there on the asphalt. An ambulance had wailed down the long, straight street. A black car with white mudguards, radio antenna on the roof and the word POLICE in white block letters on the sides had glided past, silently and slowly. Five minutes later the tinkle of broken glass had been heard as someone drove a gloved hand through a shop window; then came the sound of running footsteps and a car tearing off down a sidestreet.

  The man on the balcony had observed all this. The balcony was the ordinary kind with tubular iron rail and sides of corrugated metal. He had stood leaning on the rail, and the glow of his cigarette had been a tiny dark-red spot in the dark. At regular intervals he had stubbed out a cigarette, carefully picked the butt – barely a third of an inch long – out of the wooden holder and placed it beside the others. Ten of these butts were already neatly lined up along the edge of the saucer on the little garden table.

  It was quiet now, as quiet as it could be on a mild early summer's night in a big city. A couple of hours still remained before the women who delivered the newspapers appeared, pushing their converted prams, and before the first office cleaner went to work.

  The bleak half-light of dawn was dispersed slowly; the first hesitant sunbeams groped over the five-storeyed and six-storeyed blocks of flats and were reflected in the television aerials and the round chimney pots above the roofs on the other side of the street. Then the light fell on the metal roofs themselves, slid quickly down and crept over the eaves along plastered brick walls with rows of unseeing windows, most of which were screened by drawn curtains or lowered Venetian blinds.

  The man on the balcony leaned over and looked down the street. It ran from north to south and was long and straight; he could survey a stretch of more than two thousand yards. Once it had been an avenue, a showplace and the pride of the city, but forty years had passed since it was built. The street was almost exactly the same age as the man on the balcony.

  When he strained his eyes he could make out a lone figure in the far distance. Perhaps a policeman. For the first time in several hours he went into the flat; he passed through the living room and out into the kitchen. It was broad daylight now and he had no need to switch on the electric light; in fact he used it very sparingly even in the winter. Opening a cupboard, he took out an enamel coffeepot, then measured one and a half cups of water and two spoonfuls of coarse-ground coffee. He put the pot on the stove, struck a match and lit the gas. Felt the match with his fingertips to make sure it had gone out, then opened the door of the cupboard under the sink and threw the dead match into the bin liner. He stood at the stove until the coffee had boiled up, then turned the gas off and went out to the bathroom and urinated while waiting for the grounds to sink. He avoided flushing the toilet so as not to disturb the neighbours. Went back to the kitchen, poured the coffee carefully into the cup, took a lump of sugar from the half-empty packet on the sink and a spoon out of the drawer. Then he carried the cup to the balcony, put it on the varnished wooden table and sat down on the folding chair. The sun had already climbed fairly high and lit up the front of the buildings on the other side of the street down as far as the two lowest flats. Taking a nickel-plated snuffbox from his trouser pocket, he crumbled the cigarette butts one by one, letting the tob
acco flakes run through his fingers down into the round metal box and crumpling the bits of paper into pea-sized balls which he placed on the chipped saucer. He stirred the coffee and drank it very slowly. The sirens sounded again, far away. He stood up and watched the ambulance as the howl grew louder and louder and then subsided. A minute later the ambulance was nothing but a small white rectangle which turned left at the north end of the street and vanished from sight. Sitting down again on the folding chair he abstractedly stirred the coffee, which was now cold. He sat quite still, listening to the city wake up around him, at first reluctantly and undecidedly.

  The man on the balcony was of average height and normal build. His face was nondescript and he was dressed in a white shirt with no tie, unpressed brown gabardine trousers, grey socks and black shoes. His hair was thin and brushed straight back, he had a big nose and grey-blue eyes.

  The time was half past six on the morning of 2 June 1967. The city was Stockholm.

  The man on the balcony had no feeling of being observed. He had no particular feeling of anything. He thought he would make some oatmeal a little later.

  The street was coming alive. The stream of vehicles was denser and every time the traffic lights at the intersection changed to red the line of waiting cars grew longer. A baker's van tooted angrily at a cyclist who swung out heedlessly into the road. Two cars behind braked with a screech.

  The man got up, leaned his arms on the balcony rail and looked down into the street. The cyclist wobbled anxiously in towards the kerb, pretending not to hear the abuse slung at him by the delivery man.

  On the pavements a few pedestrians hurried along. Two women in light summer dresses stood talking by the petrol station below the balcony, and farther away a man was exercising his dog. He jerked impatiently at the lead while the dachshund unconcernedly sniffed around the trunk of a tree.