Читать книгу The Abominable Man - Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloeoe - Страница 9

It was Friday evening and Stockholm's cafés should have been full of happy people enjoying themselves after the drudgery of the week. Such, however, was not the case, and it wasn't hard to work out why. In the course of the preceding five years, restaurant prices had as good as doubled, and very few ordinary wage-earners could afford to treat themselves to even one night out a month. The restaurant owners complained and talked crisis, but the ones who had not turned their establishments into pubs or discotheques to attract the easy-spending young managed to keep their heads above water by means of the increasing number of businessmen with credit cards and expense accounts who preferred to conduct their transactions across a laden table.

The Golden Peace in the Old City was no exception. It was late, to be sure – Friday had turned into Saturday – but during the last hour there had been only two guests in the ground-floor dining room. A man and a woman. They'd eaten steak tartare and were now drinking coffee and punsch as they talked in low voices across the table in the alcove.

Two waitresses sat folding napkins at a little table opposite the entrance. The younger, who was red-haired and looked tired, stood up and threw a glance at the clock above the bar. She yawned, picked up a napkin and walked over to the guests in the alcove.

‘Will there be anything else before the bar closes?’ she said, using the napkin to sweep some crumbs of tobacco from the tablecloth. ‘Would you care for some more hot coffee, Inspector?’

Martin Beck noticed to his own surprise that he was flattered at her knowing who he was. He was normally irritated by any reminder that as chief of the National Murder Squad he was a more or less public personage, but it was a long time now since he'd had his picture in the papers or appeared on television, and he took the waitress's recognition only as an indication that the Peace was beginning to regard him as a regular customer. Rightly so, for that matter. He'd been living not far away for two years now, and when he now and again went out to eat he gave his custom mostly to the Peace. Having a companion, as he did this evening, was less usual.

The girl across from him was his daughter, Ingrid. She was nineteen years old, and if you overlooked the fact that she was very blonde and he very dark, they were strikingly similar.

‘Do you want more coffee?’ asked Martin Beck.

Ingrid shook her head and the waitress withdrew to prepare the bill. Martin Beck lifted the little bottle of punsch from its ice bucket and poured what remained into the two glasses. Ingrid sipped at hers.

‘We ought to do this more often,’ she said.

‘Drink punsch?’

‘Mmm, it is good. No, I mean get together. Next time I'll invite you to dinner. At my place on Klostervägen. You haven't seen it yet.’

Ingrid had moved away from home three months before her parents separated. Martin Beck sometimes wondered if he ever would have had the strength to break out of his stagnant marriage to Inga if Ingrid hadn't encouraged him. She hadn't been happy at home and moved in with a friend even before she was out of school. Now she was studying sociology at the university and had just recently found a one-room apartment in Stocksund. For the time being she was still subletting, but she had prospects of eventually getting the lease on her own.

‘Mama and Rolf were out to visit the day before yesterday,’ she said. ‘I was hoping you'd come too, but I couldn't get hold of you.’

‘No, I was in Örebro for a couple of days. How are they?’

‘Fine. Mama had a whole trunkload of stuff with her. Towels and napkins and that blue coffee service and I don't know what all. Oh, and we talked about Rolf's birthday. Mama wants us to come out and have dinner with them. If you can.’

Rolf was three years younger than Ingrid. They were as different as a brother and sister can be, but they'd always got along well.

The redhead came with the bill. Martin Beck paid and emptied his glass. He looked at his wristwatch. It was a couple of minutes to one.

‘Shall we go?’ said Ingrid, quickly downing the last few drops of her punsch.

They strolled north on Österlänggatan. The stars were out and the air was quite chilly. A couple of drunken teenagers came walking out of Drakens Gränd, shouting and hollering until the walls of the old buildings echoed with the din.

Ingrid put her hand under her father's arm and matched her stride to his. She was long-legged and slim, almost skinny, Martin Beck thought, but she herself was always saying she'd have to go on a diet.

‘Do you want to come up?’ he asked on the hill up towards Köpmantorget.

‘Yes, but only to call a taxi. It's late, and you have to sleep.’

Martin Beck yawned.

‘As a matter of fact I am rather tired,’ he said.

A man was squatting by the base of the statue of St George and the Dragon. He seemed to be sleeping, his forehead resting against his knees.

As Ingrid and Martin Beck passed, he lifted his head and said something inarticulate in a high thick voice, then stretched his legs out in front of him and fell asleep again with his chin on his chest.

‘Shouldn't he be sleeping it off at Nicolai?’ said Ingrid. ‘It's a bit cold to be sitting outside.’

‘He'll probably wind up there eventually,’ Martin Beck said. ‘If there's room. But it's a long time since it was my job to take care of drunks.’

They walked on into Köpmangatan in silence.

Martin Beck was thinking about the summer twenty-two years ago when he'd walked a beat in the Nicolai precinct. Stockholm was a different city then. The Old City had been an idyllic little town. More drunkenness and poverty and misery, of course, before they'd cleared out the slums and restored the buildings and raised the rents so the old tenants could no longer afford to stay. Living here had become fashionable, and he himself was now one of the privileged few.

They rode to the top floor in the lift, which had been installed when the building was renovated and was one of the few in the Old City. The flat was completely modernized and consisted of a hall, a small kitchen, a bathroom and two rooms whose windows opened on to a large open courtyard on the east. The rooms were snug and asymmetrical, with deep bay windows and low ceilings. The first of the two rooms was furnished with comfortable easy chairs and low tables and had a fireplace. The inner room contained a broad bed framed by deep built-in shelves and cupboards and, by the window, a huge desk with drawers beneath.

Without taking off her coat, Ingrid went in and sat down at the desk, lifted the receiver and dialled for a taxi.

‘Won't you stay for a minute?’ Martin called from the kitchen.

‘No, I have to go home and get to bed. I'm dead tired. So are you, for that matter.’

Martin Beck made no objection. All of a sudden he didn't feel a bit sleepy, but all evening long he'd been yawning, and at the cinema – they'd been to see Truffaut's The 400 Blows – he'd several times been on the verge of dozing off.

Ingrid finally got hold of a taxi, came out to the kitchen and kissed Martin Beck on the cheek.

‘Thanks for a good time. I'll see you at Rolf's birthday if not before. Sleep well.’

Martin Beck followed her out to the lift and whispered good night before closing the doors and going back into his flat.

He poured the beer he'd taken from the refrigerator into a big glass, walked in and set it on the desk. Then he went to the hi-fi by the fireplace, looked through his records and put one of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos on the turntable. The building was well insulated and he knew he could turn the volume quite high without bothering the neighbours. He sat down at the desk and drank the beer, which was fresh and cold and washed away the sweet sticky taste of punsch. He pinched together the paper mouthpiece of a Florida, put the cigarette between his teeth and lit a match. Then he rested his chin in his hands and stared out through the window.

The spring sky arched deep blue and starry above the moonlit roof on the other side of the courtyard. Martin Beck listened to the music and let his thoughts wander freely. He felt utterly relaxed and content.

When he'd turned the record, he walked over to the shelf above the bed and lifted down a half-completed model of the clipper ship Flying Cloud. He worked on masts and yards for almost an hour before putting the model back on its shelf.

While getting undressed, he admired his two completed models with a certain pride – the Cutty Sark and the training ship Danmark. Soon he'd have only the rigging left to do on the Flying Cloud, the most difficult and the most trying part.

He walked naked out to the kitchen and put the ashtray and the beer glass on the counter beside the sink. Then he turned out all the lights except the one above his pillow, closed the bedroom door to a crack and went to bed. He wound the clock, which said two thirty-five, and checked to see that the alarm button was pushed in. He had, he hoped, a free day in front of him and could sleep as long as he liked.

Kurt Bergengren's Archipelago Steamboats lay on the bedside table and he browsed through it, looking at pictures he'd studied carefully before and reading a passage here and a caption there with a strong feeling of nostalgia. The book was large and heavy and not particularly well suited for reading in bed, and his arms were soon tired from holding it. He put it aside and reached out to turn off the reading light.

Then the telephone rang.