Читать книгу The Abominable Man - Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloeoe - Страница 10

Einar Rönn really was dead tired.

He'd been at work for over seventeen hours at a single stretch. Right at the moment, he was standing in the Criminal Division orderly room in the police building on Kungsholmsgatan, looking at a sobbing male adult who had laid hands on one of his fellow men.

For that matter maybe ‘male adult’ was saying too much, since the prisoner was by and large only a child. An eighteen-year-old boy with shoulder-length blond hair, bright red Levi's and a brown suede jacket with a fringe and the word LOVE painted on the back. The letters were surrounded by ornamental flowers in flourishes of pink and violet and baby blue. There were also flowers and words on the legs of his boots; to be precise, the words PEACE and MAGGIE. Long fringes of soft wavy human hair were ingeniously sewn to the jacket's arms.

It was enough to make you wonder if someone hadn't been scalped.

Rönn felt like sobbing himself. Partly from exhaustion, but mostly, as was so often the case these days, because he felt sorrier for the criminal than for the victim.

The young man with the pretty hair had tried to kill a drug pusher. The attempt had not been particularly successful, yet successful enough that the police regarded him as a prime suspect for attempted murder in the second degree.

Rönn had been hunting him since five o'clock that afternoon, which meant he'd been forced to track down and search through no fewer than eighteen drug hangouts in different parts of his beautiful city, each one filthier and more repulsive than the one before.

All because some bastard who sold hash mixed with opium to school kids on Mariatorget had got a bump on the head. All right, caused by an iron pipe and motivated by the fact that the agent of the blow was broke. But after all. Rönn thought.

Plus: nine hours'overtime, which for that matter would be ten before he got home to his apartment in Vällingby.

But you had to take the bad with the good. In this case the good would be the salary.

Rönn was from Lapland, born in Arjeplog and married to a Lappish girl. He didn't particularly like Vällingby, but he liked the name of the street he lived on: Lapland Street.

He looked on while one of his younger colleagues, on night duty, wrote out a receipt for the transfer of the prisoner and delivered up the hair fetish to two guards, who in their turn shoved the prisoner into a lift for forwarding to the booking section three flights up.

A transfer receipt is a piece of paper bearing the name of the prisoner and binding on no one, on the back of which the duty officer writes appropriate remarks. For example: Very wild, threw himself again and again against the wall and was injured. Or: Uncontrollable, ran into a door and was injured. Maybe just: Fell down and hurt himself.

And so on.

The door from the yard opened and two constables ushered in an older man with a bushy grey beard. Just as they crossed the threshold one of the constables drove his fist into the prisoner's abdomen. The man doubled up and gave out a stifled cry, something like the howl of a dog. The two on-duty detectives shuffled their papers undisturbed.

Rönn threw a tired look at the constables but said nothing.

Then he yawned and looked at his watch.

Seventeen minutes after two.

The telephone rang. One of the detectives answered.

‘Yes, this is Criminal, Gustavsson here.’

Rönn put on his fur hat and moved towards the door. He had his hand on the knob when the man named Gustavsson stopped him.

‘What? Wait a second. Hey, Rönn?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Here's something for you.’

‘What now?’

‘Something at Mount Sabbath. Somebody's been shot or something. The guy on the phone sounds pretty confused.’

Rönn sighed and turned around. Gustavsson took his hand off the receiver.

‘One of the boys from Violent Crime is here right now. One of the big wheels. Okay?’

A short pause.

‘Yes, yes, I can hear you. It's awful, yes. Now, exactly where are you?’

Gustavsson was a thinnish man in his thirties with a tough and impassive air. He listened, then put his hand over the receiver again.

‘He's at the main entrance to the central building at Mount Sabbath. Obviously needs help. Are you going?’

‘Okay,’ Rönn said. ‘I suppose I will.’

‘Do you need a ride? This radio car seems to be free.’

Rönn looked a little woefully at the two constables and shook his head. They were big and strong and armed with pistols and batons in leather holsters. Their prisoner lay like a whimpering bundle at their feet.

They themselves stared jealously and foolishly at Rönn, the hope of promotion in their shallow blue eyes.

‘No, I'll take my own car,’ he said, and left.

Einar Rönn was no big wheel, and right at the moment he didn't feel even like a cog. There were some people who thought he was a very able policeman, and others who said he was typically mediocre. Be that as it may, he had, after years of faithful service, become a deputy inspector on the Violent Crime Squad. A real sleuth, to use the language of the tabloids. That he was peaceable and middle-aged, red-nosed and slightly corpulent from sitting still too much – on those points everyone agreed.

It took him four minutes and twelve seconds to drive to the indicated address.

Mount Sabbath Hospital is spread out over a large, hilly, roughly triangular tract with its base in the north along Vasa Park, its sides along Dalagatan on the east and Torsgatan on the west, and its tip cut off abruptly by the approach to the new bridge over Barnhus Bay. A large brick building belonging to the gasworks pushes in from Torsgatan, putting a notch in one corner.

The hospital gets its name from an innkeeper, Vallentin Sabbath, who, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, owned two taverns in the Old City – the Rostock and the Lion. He bought land here and raised carp in ponds that have since dried out or been filled in, and for three years he operated a restaurant on the property before departing this life in 1720.

About ten years later a mineral springs, or spa, was opened on the premises. The two-hundred-year-old mineral springs hotel, which in the course of the years has seen service both as a hospital and a poorhouse, now crouches in the shadow of an eight-storey geriatric centre.

The original hospital was built a little more than a hundred years ago on the rocky outcropping along Dalagatan and consisted of a number of pavilions connected by long, covered passages. Some of the old pavilions are still in use, but a number of them have quite recently been torn down and replaced by new ones, and the system of passages is now underground.

At the far end of the grounds stand a number of older buildings that house the old people's home. There is a little chapel here, and in the middle of a garden of lawns and hedges and gravel walks there is a yellow summerhouse with white trim and a spire on its rounded roof. An avenue of trees leads from the chapel to an old gatehouse down by the street. Behind the chapel the grounds rise higher only to come to a sudden stop high above Torsgatan, which curves between the cliff and the Bonnier Building across the way. This is the quietest and least frequented part of the hospital area. The main entrance is on Dalagatan where it was a hundred years ago, and next to it is the new central hospital building.