The Man Who Went Up in Smoke Read online

  ‘Uh-huh. Well, had you given him any cause to talk like that?’

  ‘I'd told him my old lady was German. That was before.’

  ‘Before you began drinking?’

  ‘Yes. Then he just said it didn't matter what kind of mother a guy had.’

  ‘And when he was about to go out into the kitchen, you took the bottle and hit him from behind?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he fall?’

  ‘He sort of fell to his knees. And began bleeding. And then he said, “You bloody little Nazi runt, you, now you're in for it.” ’

  ‘And so you went on hitting him?’

  ‘I was … afraid. He was bigger than me and … you don't know what it feels like … everything just goes round and round and goes red … I didn't seem to know what I was doing.’

  The man's shoulders were shaking violently.

  ‘That's enough,’ said Kollberg, switching off the tape recorder. ‘Give him something to eat and ask the doctor if he can have a sedative.’

  The policeman by the door rose, put his cap on and led the murderer out, holding him loosely by the arm.

  ‘Bye for now. See you tomorrow,’ said Kollberg absently.

  At the same time he was writing mechanically on the paper in front of him, ‘Confessed in tears.’

  ‘Quite a character,’ he said.

  ‘Five previous convictions for assault,’ said Melander. ‘In spite of his denying it every time. I remember him very well.’

  ‘Said the walking card file,’ Kollberg commented.

  He rose heavily and stared at Martin Beck.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he said. ‘Go take your holiday and let us look after the criminal ways of the lower classes. Where are you going, by the way? To the islands?’

  Martin Beck nodded.

  ‘Smart,’ said Kollberg. ‘I went to Rumania first and got fried-in Mamaia. Then I come home and get boiled. Great. And you don't have any telephone out there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Excellent. I'm going to take a shower now anyhow. Come on. Run along now.’

  Martin Beck thought it over. The suggestion had its advantages. Among other things, he would get away a day earlier. He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I'm leaving. Bye, boys. See you in a month.’

  2

  Most people's holidays were already over and Stockholm's August-hot streets had begun to fill with people who had spent a few rainy July weeks in tents and trailers and country boarding-houses. During the last few days, the subway had once again become crowded, but it was now the middle of the working day and Martin Beck was almost alone in the car. He sat looking at the dusty greenery outside and was glad that his eagerly awaited holiday had at last begun.

  His family had already been out in the archipelago for a month. This summer they had had the good fortune to rent a cottage from a distant relative of his wife's, a cottage situated all by itself on a little island in the central part of the archipelago. The relative had gone abroad and the cottage was theirs, until the children went back to school.

  Martin Beck let himself into his empty flat, went straight into the kitchen and took a beer out of the refrigerator. He took a few gulps standing by the sink, then carried the bottle with him into the bedroom. He undressed and walked out onto the balcony in nothing but his shorts. He sat for a while in the sun, his feet on the balcony rail as he finished off the beer. The heat out there was almost intolerable and when the bottle was empty, he got up and went back into the relative cool of the flat.

  He looked at his watch. The boat would be leaving in two hours. The island was located in an area of the archipelago where transportation to and from the city was still maintained by one of the few remaining old steamers. This, thought Martin Beck, was just about the best part of their summer holiday find.

  He went out into the kitchen and put the empty bottle down on the pantry floor. The pantry had already been cleared of everything that might spoil, but for safety's sake he looked around to see if he had forgotten anything before he shut the pantry door. Then he pulled the refrigerator plug out of the wall, put the ice trays in the sink and looked around the kitchen before shutting the door and going into the bedroom to pack.

  Most of what he needed for himself he had already taken out to the island on the weekend he had already spent there. His wife had given him a list of things which she and the children wanted brought out, and by the time he had included everything, he had two bags full. As he also had to pick up a box of food from the supermarket, he decided to take a taxi to the boat.

  There was plenty of room on board and when Martin Beck had put his bags down, he went up on deck and sat down.

  The heat was trembling over the city and it was almost dead calm. The foliage in Karl XII Square had lost its freshness and the flags on the Grand Hotel were drooping. Martin Beck looked at his watch and waited impatiently for the men down there to pull in the gangplank.

  When he felt the first vibrations from the engine, he got up and walked to the stern. The boat backed away from the quay and he leaned over the railing, watching the propellers whipping up the water into a whitish-green foam. The steam whistle sounded hoarsely, and as the boat began to turn toward Saltsjön, its hull shuddering, Martin Beck stood by the railing and turned his face towards the cool breeze. He suddenly felt free and untroubled; for a brief moment he seemed to relive the feeling he had had as a boy on the first day of the summer holidays.

  He had dinner in the dining saloon, then went out and sat on deck again. Before approaching the jetty where he was to land, the boat passed his island, and he saw the cottage and some gaily coloured garden chairs and his wife down on the shore. She was crouching at the water's edge, and he guessed she was scrubbing potatoes. She rose and waved, but he was not certain she could see him at such a distance with the afternoon sun in her eyes.

  The children came out to meet him in the rowboat. Martin Beck liked rowing, and ignoring his son's protests, he took the oars and rowed across the bay between the steamer jetty and the island. His daughter – whose name was Ingrid, but who was called Baby although she would be fifteen in a few days – sat in the stern talking about a barn dance. Rolf, who was thirteen and despised girls, was talking about a pike he had landed. Martin listened absently, enjoying the rowing.

  After he had taken off his city clothes, he took a brief swim by the rock before pulling on his blue trousers and sweater. After dinner he sat chatting with his wife outside the cottage, watching the sun go down behind the islands on the other side of the mirror-smooth bay. He went to bed early, after setting out some nets with his son.

  For the first time in a very long time, he fell asleep immediately.

  When he woke, the sun was still low and there was dew on the grass as he padded out and sat down on a rock outside the cottage. It looked as if the day would be as fine as the previous one, but the sun had not yet begun to grow warm, and he was cold in his pyjamas. After a while he went in again and sat down on the veranda with a cup of coffee. When it was seven, he dressed and woke his son, who got up reluctantly. They rowed out and hauled in the nets, which contained nothing but a mass of seaweed and water plants. When they got back, the other two were up and breakfast was on the table.

  After breakfast Martin Beck went down to the shed and began to hang up and clean the nets. It was work that tried his patience and he decided that in the future he ought to make his son responsible for providing fish for the family.

  He had almost finished the last net when he heard the stutter of a motorboat behind him, and a small fishing boat rounded the point, heading straight for him. At once he recognized the man in the boat. It was Nygren, the owner of a small boatyard on the next island, and their nearest neighbour. As there was no water on the Becks' island, they fetched their drinking water from him. Nygren also had a telephone.

  Nygren turned off the motor and shouted:

  ‘Telephone. They want you to call back as soon as possible.
I wrote the number down on a slip of paper by the telephone.’

  ‘Didn't he say who he was?’ said Martin Beck, although he in fact already knew.

  ‘I wrote that down too. I've got to go out to Skärholmen now, and Elsa's in the strawberry patch, but the kitchen door's open.’

  Nygren started up the motor again and, standing in the stern, headed out towards the bay. Before he vanished around the point, he raised his hand in farewell.

  Martin Beck watched him for a short while. Then he went down to the jetty, untied the rowboat and began to row toward Nygren's boathouse. As he rowed he thought: Hell. To hell with Kollberg, just when I'd almost forgotten he existed!

  On the pad below the wall telephone in Nygren's kitchen was written, almost illegibly: Hammar 54 10 60.

  Martin Beck dialled the number and not until he was waiting for the exchange to put him through did he begin to feel real alarm.

  ‘Hammar speaking,’ said Hammar.

  ‘Well, what's happened?’

  ‘I'm really sorry, Martin, but I've got to ask you to come in as soon as possible. You may have to sacrifice the rest of your holiday. Well, postpone it, that is.’

  Hammar was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, ‘If you will.’

  ‘The rest of my holiday? I haven't even had a day of it yet.’

  ‘Awfully sorry, Martin, but I wouldn't ask you if it wasn't necessary. Can you get in today?’

  ‘Today? What's happened?’

  ‘If you can get in today, it'd be a good thing. It's really important. I'll tell you more about it when you're here.’

  ‘There's a boat in an hour,’ said Martin Beck, looking out through the fly-specked window at the glittering, sunlit bay. ‘What's so important about it? Couldn't Kollberg or Melander—’

  ‘No. You'll have to handle this. Someone seems to have disappeared.’

  3

  When Martin Beck opened the door to his chief's room it was ten to one and he had been on holiday for exactly twenty-four hours.

  Chief Inspector Hammar was a heavily-built man with a bull-neck and bushy grey hair. He sat quite still in his swivel chair, his forearms resting on the top of his desk, completely absorbed in what malicious tongues maintained was his favourite occupation: namely, doing nothing whatsoever.

  ‘Oh, you've arrived,’ he said sourly. ‘Just in time too. You're due at the FO in half an hour.’

  ‘The Foreign Office?’

  ‘Precisely. You're to see this man.’

  Hammar was holding a calling card by one corner, between his thumb and forefinger, as if it were a piece of lettuce with a caterpillar on it. Martin Beck looked at the name. It meant nothing to him.

  ‘A higher-up,’ said Hammar. ‘Considers himself very close to the Minister.’ He paused slightly, then said, ‘I've never heard of the fellow either.’

  Hammar was fifty-nine and had been a policeman since 1927. He did not like politicians.

  ‘You don't look as angry as you ought to,’ said Hammar.

  Martin Beck puzzled on this for a moment. He decided that he was much too confused to be angry.

  ‘What is this actually all about?’

  ‘We'll talk about it later. When you've met this nitwit here.’

  ‘You said something about a disappearance.’

  Hammar stared in torment out through the window, then shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘The whole thing's quite idiotic. To tell you the truth, I've had … instructions not to give you any so-called further information until you've been to the FO.’

  ‘Have we started taking orders from them too?’

  ‘As you know, there are several departments,’ said Hammar dreamily.

  His look became lost somewhere in the summer foliage. He said, ‘Since I began here we have had a whole regiment of Ministers. The overwhelming majority of them have known just about as much about the police as I know about the orange-shell louse. Namely, that it exists. G'bye,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Bye,’ said Martin Beck.

  When Martin Beck reached the door, Hammar returned to the present and said, ‘Martin.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One thing I can tell you, anyhow. You needn't take this on if you don't want to.’

  The man who was close to the Minister was large, angular and red-haired. He stared at Martin Beck with watery blue eyes, rose swiftly and expansively and rushed around his desk with his arm outstretched.

  ‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘Splendid of you to come.’

  They shook hands with great enthusiasm. Martin Beck said nothing.

  The man returned to his swivel chair, grabbed his cold pipe and bit on the stem of it with his large, yellow, horse teeth. Then he heaved himself backward in his chair, jammed a thumb into the bowl of his pipe, lit a match and fixed his visitor with a cold, appraising look through the cloud of smoke.

  ‘No ceremony,’ he said. ‘I always begin a serious conversation this way. Spit in each other's faces. Things seem to go along more easily afterward. My name's Martin.’

  ‘So's mine,’ said Martin Beck gloomily.

  A moment later, he added, ‘That's unfortunate. Perhaps it complicates the issue.’

  This seemed to confound the man. He looked sharply at Martin Beck, as if sensing some treachery ahead. Then he laughed uproariously.

  ‘Of course. Funny. Ha ha ha.’

  Suddenly he fell silent and threw himself at the intercom. Pressing the buttons nervously, he mumbled, ‘Yes, yes. Really damned funny.’

  There was not a spark of humour in his voice.

  ‘May I have the Alf Matsson file,’ he called.

  A middle-aged woman came in with a file and put it down on the desk in front of him. He did not even condescend to glance at her. When she had closed the door behind her, he turned his cold, impersonal fisheyes on Martin Beck, slowly opening the file at the same time. It contained one single sheet of paper, covered with scrawled pencil notes.

  ‘This is a tricky and damned unpleasant story,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Martin Beck. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Do you know Matsson?’

  Martin Beck shook his head.

  ‘No? He's quite well known, actually. Journalist. Mainly in the weeklies. Television too. A clever writer. Here.’

  He opened a drawer and rummaged around in it, then in another, finally lifting up his blotter and finding the object of his search.

  ‘I hate carelessness,’ he said, throwing a spiteful look in the direction of the door.

  Martin Beck studied the object, which turned out to be a neatly typed index card containing certain information about a person by the name of Alf Matsson. The man did indeed appear to be a journalist, employed by one of the larger weeklies, one which Martin Beck himself never read but sometimes saw – with unspoken anxiety and distrust – in the hands of his children. In addition, Alf Sixten Matsson was said to have been born in Gothenburg in 1934. Clipped to the card was also an ordinary passport photograph. Martin Beck cocked his head and looked at a fairly young man with a moustache, a short neat beard and round steel-rimmed glasses. His face was so utterly expressionless that the picture must have come from one of those photo booths around town. Martin Beck put the card down and looked questioningly at the red-haired man.

  ‘Alf Matsson has disappeared,’ said the man with great emphasis.

  ‘Oh, yes? And your inquiries haven't produced any results?’

  ‘No inquiries have been made. And none are going to be made either,’ said the man, staring like a maniac.

  Martin Beck, who did not realize at first that that watery look testified to a steely determination, frowned slightly.

  ‘How long has he been gone?’

  ‘Ten days.’

  The reply did not especially surprise him. If the man had said ten minutes or ten years, it would not have moved him particularly either. The only thing that surprised Martin Beck at that moment was the fact that he was sitting here and not in a rowing boat out at the isl
and. He looked at his watch. He would probably have time to catch the evening boat back.

  ‘Ten days isn't very long,’ he said mildly.

  Another official came in from a nearby room and entered into the conversation so directly that he must have been listening at the door. Apparently some kind of caretaker, thought Martin Beck.

  ‘In this particular case, it's more than enough,’ said the new arrival. ‘The circumstances are highly exceptional. Alf Matsson flew to Budapest on the twenty-second of July, sent there by his magazine to write some articles. On the next Monday, he was to call the office here in Stockholm and read the text of a kind of regular column he writes every week. He didn't. It's relevant that Alf Matsson always delivered on time, as newspaper people say. In other words, he doesn't miss a deadline when it comes to turning in manuscripts. Two days later, the office phoned his hotel in Budapest, where they said that he was staying there, but he didn't seem to be in at that moment. The office left a message to say that Matsson should immediately inform Stockholm the moment he came in. They waited for two more days. Nothing was heard. They checked with his wife here in Stockholm. She hadn't heard anything either. That in itself wouldn't necessarily mean anything, as they're getting a divorce. Last Saturday the editor called us up here. By then they had contacted the hotel again and been told that no one there had seen Matsson since they called last, but that his things were still in his room and his passport was still at the reception desk. Last Monday, the first of August, we communicated with our people down there. They knew nothing about Matsson, but put out a feeler, as they called it, to the Hungarian police, who appeared “not interested.” Last Tuesday we had a visit from the editor in chief of the magazine. It was a very unpleasant meeting.’

  The redheaded man had definitely been upstaged. He bit on the stem of his pipe in annoyance and said, ‘Yes, exactly. Damned unpleasant.’

  A moment later he added by way of explanation: ‘This is my secretary.’

  ‘Well,’ said his secretary, ‘anyhow, the result of that conversation was that yesterday we made unofficial contact with the police at top level, which in turn led to your coming here today. Pleased to have you here, by the way.’