The Abominable Man

MAJ SJÖWALL AND

PER WAHLÖÖ

The Abominable Man

Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This ebook first published by Harper Perennial in 2009

This 4th Estate edition published in 2016

This translation first published by Random House Inc,

New York, in 1972

Originally published in Sweden by P. A. Norstedt & Söners Forlag

Copyright text © Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö 1971

Copyright introduction © Arne Dahl 2009

Cover photograph © Shutterstock

PS Section © Richard Shephard 2007

PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors' imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780007439171

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007323449

Version: 2016-03-30

Praise

From the reviews of the Martin Beck series:

‘First class’

Daily Telegraph

‘One of the most authentic, gripping and profound collections of police procedural ever accomplished’

MICHAEL CONNELLY

‘Hauntingly effective storytelling’

New York Times

‘There's just no question about it: the reigning King and Queen of mystery fiction are Maj Sjöwall and her husband Per Wahlöö’

The National Observer

‘Sjöwall/Wahlöö are the best writers of police procedural in the world’

Birmingham Post

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

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 Authors

Other Books by

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Nations are stereotyped as easily as anything else, and in the 1960s and 70s most of us thought of Sweden as a paradise, where social democracy worked, where the welfare state was successful, where the girls were blonde and beautiful, where the scenery was lovely and the buildings half-timbered, and where sexuality was frank and innocent. Even its legendary suicide rate could be seen in a positive light, as being the result of the admirable willingness of Sweden’s coroners to be open and honest instead of hushing things up because of outdated taboos.

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo lived there, and knew different.

They’re usually described as a wife-and-husband team, but they weren’t married. They’re usually described as Marxists,but they were, more accurately, modern European socialists, intensely sceptical of capitalist excess. What is agreed upon – and what we readers should be grateful for – is that instead of writing agitprop in obscure journals, they aired their views in a series of ten crime novels, of which this title was the seventh. Originally the series had a single subtitle – what we might now call a strapline – which was ‘The Story of a Crime’, and which, it became clear, had a dual meaning. The books were crime stories, obviously, but the series as a whole was the authors’ indictment of the way power treats the powerless.

All very worthy, all very noble and interesting, and like most things worthy and noble and interesting probably destined for the footnotes of history – except that along the way Sjowall and Wahloo also invented a brand-new type of police procedural that changed the genre for ever and still resonates to this day.

Their criticism of government was unrestrained: ‘The centre of Stockholm had been subjected to sweeping and violent changes in the course of the last ten years. Entire districts had been levelled and new ones constructed … What was behind all this activity was hardly an ambition to create a humane social environment but rather a desire to achieve the fullest possible exploitation of valuable land.’ With predictable results: ‘This is an insane city in a country that’s mentally deranged.’

The police force was both their narrative vehicle and their political focus. Again stereotypically, because Sweden had been neutral during World War Two, and because the girls were blonde and beautiful, we thought of Sweden as an essentially pacifist country, but Sjowall and Wahloo were at pains to point out its central militaristic culture, and the way in which the police recruited from the military ranks. They saw the nationalisation of Sweden’s regional police forces in the mid-1960s as a final nail in the coffin, as a transition to a paramilitary force answerable to, and interested in, no one but itself: ‘If you really want to be sure of getting caught, the thing to do is kill a policeman … There are plenty of unsolved murders in Swedish criminal history, but not one of them involves the murder of a policeman.’ And: ‘… everyone knows it’s pointless to report a policeman. The general public has no legal rights vis-à-vis the police.’

Interesting, eye-opening and worthy, but forgettable, regrettably, except that their narrative vehicle was so perversely compelling. Cop stories until then had tended to be exaggerated and glamorous, but Sjowall and Wahloo went the other way. Their manifesto is recapitulated in this book as succinctly as anywhere: ‘Police work is built on realism, routine, stubbornness and system.’

And in the middle of it was Martin Beck.

By this seventh title Beck was fully mature and fully realized as a character. Dour, determined, dissatisfied, dogged, even a little depressed, he was revolutionary at the time, and lives on as the grandfather of practically all current Scandinavian detectives, as well as foreigners as far-flung as Ian Rankin’s John Rebus and Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko. He is a marvellous invention, well served by a supporting cast of colleagues as superbly drawn as, say, Ed McBain’s ‘87th Precinct’ repertory. (And very well served, here and elsewhere, it must be said, by Thomas Teal’s English translation, which captures Beck’s weary, sardonic tone to perfection.) Even minor passing characters are delightfully written: in this text, one Captain Hult is found wearing his uniform on his day off. ‘I wear my uniform most of the time,’ he says. ‘I prefer it.’ Thus Sjowall and Wahloo create an impression in eleven words, where some writers would use eleven paragraphs.

And surprisingly, given the rubric of routine, the plotting is equally able. Subtle reversals come thick and fast. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say this book opens with the gruesome murder of a senior policeman. But ‘The Abominable Man’ is not the perpetrator – it’s the victim. The moral ground shifts under our feet just as new clues alter the direction of the investigation. These books work superbly well as thrillers – no question about that – but they’re remembered for making the crime novel socially realistic. Or is it the other way around?

Lee Child

New York, 2011

1

Just after midnight he stopped thinking.

He'd been writing something earlier, but now the blue ballpoint pen lay in front of him on the newspaper, exactly in the right-hand column of the crossword puzzle. He was sitting erect and utterly motionless on a worn wooden chair in front of a low table in the cramped little attic room. A round yellowish lampshade with a long fringe hung above his head. The fabric was pale with age, and the light from the feeble bulb was hazy and uncertain.

It was quiet in the house. But the quiet was relative – inside there were three people breathing, and from outside came an indistinct, pulsating, barely discernible murmur. As if from traffic on far-off roads, or from a distant boiling sea. The sound of a million human beings. Of a large city in its anxious sleep.

The man in the attic room was dressed in a beige lumber jacket, grey ski pants, a machine-knit black turtleneck jumper and brown ski boots. He had a large but well-tended moustache, just a shade lighter than the hair combed smoothly back at an angle across his head. His face was narrow, with a clean profile and finely chiselled features, and behind the rigid mask of resentful accusation and obstinate purpose there was an almost childlike expression, weak and perplexed and appealing, and nevertheless a little bit calculating.

His clear blue eyes were steady but vacant.

He looked like a little boy grown suddenly very old.

The man sat stock still for almost an hour, the palms of his hands resting on his thighs, his eyes staring blankly at the same spot on the faded flowered wallpaper.

Then he stood up, walked across the room, opened a closet door, reached up with his left hand and took something from the shelf. A long thin object wrapped in a white kitchen towel with a red border.

The object was a carbine bayonet.

He drew it and very carefully wiped off the yellow gun grease before sliding it into its steel-blue scabbard.

In spite of the fact that he was tall and rather heavy, his movements were quick and lithe and economical, and his hands were as steady as his gaze.

He unbuckled his belt and slid it through the leather loop on the sheath. Then he zipped up his jacket, put on a pair of gloves and a chequered tweed cap and left the house.

The wooden stairs creaked beneath his weight, but his footsteps themselves were inaudible.

The house was small and old and stood on the top of a little hill above the main road. It was a chilly, starlit night.

The man in the tweed cap swung around the corner of the house and moved with the sureness of a sleepwalker towards the driveway behind.

He opened the left front door of his black Volkswagen, climbed in behind the wheel and adjusted the bayonet, which rested against his right thigh.

Then he started the engine, turned on the headlights, backed out on to the main road and drove north.

The little black car hurtled forward through the darkness precisely and implacably, as if it were a weightless craft in space.

The buildings tightened along the road and the city rose up beneath its dome of light, huge and cold and desolate, stripped of everything but hard naked surfaces of metal, glass and concrete.

Not even in the central city was there any street life at this hour of the night. With the exception of an occasional taxi, two ambulances and a patrol car, everything was dead. The police car was black with white sides and rushed quickly past on its own bawling carpet of sound.

The traffic lights changed from red to yellow to green to yellow to red with a meaningless mechanical monotony.

The black car drove strictly in accordance with traffic regulations, never exceeded the speed limit, slowed at all cross streets and stopped at all red lights.

It drove along Vasagatan past the Central Station and the newly completed Sheraton-Stockholm, swung left at Norra Bantorget and continued north on Torsgatan.

In the square was an illuminated tree and bus 591 waiting at its stop. A new moon hung above St Eriksplan and the blue neon hands on the Bonnier Building showed the time. Twenty minutes to two.

At that instant, the man in the car was precisely thirty-six years old.

Now he drove east along Odengatan, past deserted Vasa Park with its cold white streetlamps and the thick, veined shadows of ten thousand leafless tree limbs.

The black car made another right and drove one hundred and twenty-five yards south along Dalagatan. Then it braked and stopped.

With studied negligence, the man in the lumber jacket and the tweed cap parked with two wheels on the pavement right in front of the stairs to the Eastman Institute.

He stepped out into the night and slammed the door behind him.

It was the third of April, 1971. A Saturday.

It was still only an hour and forty minutes old and nothing in particular had happened.

2

At a quarter to two the morphine stopped working.

He'd had the last injection just before ten, which meant the narcosis lasted less than four hours.

The pain came back sporadically, first on the left side of his diaphragm and then a few minutes later on the right as well. Then it radiated out towards his back and passed fitfully through his body, quick, cruel and biting, as if starving vultures had torn their way into his vitals.

He lay on his back in the tall, narrow bed and stared at the white plaster ceiling, where the dim glow of the night light and the reflections from outside produced an angular static pattern of shadows that were indecipherable and as cold and repellent as the room itself.

The ceiling wasn't flat but arched in two shallow curves and seemed distant. It was in fact high, over twelve feet, and old-fashioned like everything else in the building. The bed stood in the middle of the stone floor and there were only two other pieces of furniture: the night table and a straight-backed wooden chair.

The curtains were not completely drawn, and the window was ajar. Air filtered chilly and fresh through the two-inch crack from the spring-winter night outside, but he nevertheless felt a suffocating disgust at the rotting odour from the flowers on the night table and from his own sick body.

He had not slept but lain wakeful and silent and thought about this very fact – that the painkiller would soon wear off.

It was about an hour since he'd heard the night nurse pass the double doors to the corridor in her wooden shoes. Since then he'd heard nothing but the sound of his own breathing and maybe of his blood, pulsing heavily and unevenly through his body. But these were not distinct sounds; they were more like figments of his imagination, fitting companions to his dread of the agony that would soon begin and to his mindless fear of dying.

He had always been a hard man, unwilling to tolerate mistakes or weakness in others and never prepared to admit that he himself might someday falter, either physically or mentally.

Now he was afraid and in pain. He felt betrayed and taken by surprise. His senses had sharpened during his weeks in the hospital. He had become unnaturally sensitive to all forms of pain and shuddered even at the prospect of an injection or the needle in the fold of his arm when the nurses took the daily blood tests. On top of that he was afraid of the dark and couldn't stand to be alone and had learned to hear noises he'd never heard before.

The examinations – which ironically enough the doctors referred to as the ‘investigation’ – wore him out and made him feel worse. And the sicker he felt, the more intense his fear of death became, until it circumscribed his entire conscious life and left him utterly naked, in a state of spiritual exposure and almost obscene egoism.

Something rustled outside the window. An animal of course, padding through the withered rose bed. A field mouse or a hedgehog, maybe a cat. But didn't hedgehogs hibernate?

It must be an animal, he thought, and then no longer in control of his actions, he raised his left hand towards the electric call-button that hung in comfortable reach, wound once around the bedpost.

But when his fingers brushed the cold metal of the bed frame, his hand trembled in an involuntary spasm and the switch slid away and fell to the floor with a little rattling bang.

The sound made him pull himself together.

If he'd gotten his hand on the switch and pushed the white button, a red light would have gone on out in the corridor above his door and soon the night nurse would have come trotting from her room in her clattering wooden clogs.

Since he wasn't only afraid but also vain, he was almost glad he hadn't managed to ring.

The night nurse would have come into the room and turned on the overhead light and stared at him questioningly as he lay there in his wretchedness and misery.

He lay still for a while and felt the pain recede and then approach again in sudden waves, as if it were a runaway train driven by an insane engineer.

He suddenly became aware of a new urgency. He needed to urinate.

There was a bottle within reach, stuck down in the yellow plastic wastebasket behind the night table. But he didn't want to use it. He was allowed to get up if he wanted to. One of the doctors had even said it would be good for him to move around a little.

So he thought he'd get up and open the double doors and walk to the toilet, which was right on the other side of the corridor. It was a distraction, a practical task, something that could force his mind into new combinations for a time.

He folded aside the blanket and the sheet, heaved himself into a sitting position and sat for several seconds on the edge of the bed with his feet dangling while he pulled at the white nightgown and heard the plastic mattress cover rustling underneath him.

Then he carefully eased himself down until he felt the cold stone floor beneath the damp soles of his feet. He tried to straighten up and, in spite of the broad bandages that pulled at his groin and tightened around his thighs, he succeeded. He was still wearing plastic foam pressure-dressings from the aortography the day before.

His slippers lay beside the table and he stuck his feet into them and walked cautiously and gropingly towards the door. He opened the first door in and the second out and walked straight across the shadowy corridor and into the lavatory.

He went to the toilet and rinsed off his hands in cold water and started back, then stopped in the corridor to listen. The muffled sound of the night nurse's radio could be heard a long way off. He was in pain again and his fear came back and he thought after all he could go in and ask for a couple of painkillers. They wouldn't have any particular effect, but anyway she'd have to unlock the medicine cabinet and take out the bottle and then give him some juice, and that way at least someone would have to fuss over him for a little while.

The distance to the office was about sixty feet and he took his time. Shuffled along slowly with the sweaty nightshirt slapping against his calves.

The light was on in the duty room but there was no one there. Only the transistor radio, which stood serenading itself between two half-emptied coffee cups.

The night nurse and the orderly were busy someplace else of course.

The room began to swim and he had to support himself against the door. It felt a little better after a minute or two, and he walked slowly back towards his room through the darkened corridor.

The doors were the way he'd left them, slightly ajar. He closed them carefully, took the few steps to the bed, stepped out of his slippers, lay down on his back and pulled the blanket up to his chin with a shiver. Lay still with wide-open eyes and felt the express train rushing through his body.

Something was different. The pattern on the ceiling had changed in some slight way.

He was aware of it almost at once.

But what was it that had made the pattern of shadows and reflections change?

His gaze ran over the bare walls, then he turned his head to the right and looked towards the window.

The window had been open when he left the room, he was certain of that.

Now it was closed.

Terror overwhelmed him immediately and he lifted his hand to the call button. But it wasn't in its place. He'd forgotten to pick up the cord and the switch from the floor.

He held his fingers tightly around the iron pipe where the buzzer ought to have been and stared at the window.

The gap between the long curtains was still about two inches wide, but they weren't hanging quite the way they had been, and the window was closed.

Could someone from the staff have been in the room?

It didn't seem likely.

He felt the sweat bursting from his pores, and his nightshirt cold and clammy against his sensitive skin.

Completely at the mercy of his fear and unable to tear his eyes from the window, he began to sit up in bed.

The curtains hung absolutely motionless, yet he was certain someone was standing behind them.

Who, he thought.

Who?

And then with a last flash of common sense: This must be a hallucination.

Now he stood beside the bed, ill and unsteady, his bare feet on the stone floor. Took two uncertain steps towards the window. Came to a stop, slightly bent, his lips twitching.

The man in the window alcove threw aside the curtains with his right hand as he simultaneously drew the bayonet with his left.

Reflections glittered on the long broad blade.

The man in the lumber jacket and the chequered tweed cap took two quick steps forward and stopped, legs apart, tall, straight, with the weapon at shoulder height.

The sick man recognized him at once and started to open his mouth to bellow.

The heavy handle of the bayonet hit him across the mouth and he felt his lips being torn to shreds and his dental plate breaking.

And that was the last thing he felt.

The rest of it went too fast. Time rushed away from him.

The first blow caught him on the right side of his diaphragm just below his ribs, and the bayonet sank in to its hilt.

The sick man was still on his feet, his head thrown back, when the man in the lumber jacket raised the weapon for the third time and sliced open his throat, from the left ear to the right.

A bubbling, slightly hissing noise came from the open windpipe.

Nothing more.

3