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.

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.

Rönn felt almost ghostlike in the blue light flashing from the roof of the patrol car. But it would soon get worse.

‘What's happened?’ he said.

‘Don't know for sure. Something ugly.’ The constable looked very young. His face was open and sympathetic, but his glance wandered and he seemed to be having trouble standing still. He was holding on to the car door with his left hand and fingering the butt of his pistol a little hesitantly with his right. Ten seconds earlier he'd made a sound that could only have been a sigh of relief.

The boy's scared, Rönn thought. He made his voice reassuring.

‘Well, we'll see. Where is it?’

‘It's a bit tricky to get there. I'll drive in front.’

Rönn nodded and went back to his own car. Started the engine and followed the blue flashes in a wide swing around the central hospital and into the grounds. In the course of thirty seconds the patrol car made three right turns, two left turns, then braked and stopped outside a long low building with yellow plaster walls and a black mansard roof. It looked ancient. Above the weathered wooden door a single flickering bulb in an old-fashioned milkglass globe was fighting what was pretty much a losing battle against the darkness. The constable climbed out and assumed his former stance, fingers on car door and pistol butt as a kind of shield against the night and what it might be presumed to conceal.

‘In there,’ he said, glancing guardedly at the double wooden door.

Rönn stifled a yawn and nodded.

‘Shall I call for more men?’

‘Well, we'll see,’ Rönn repeated good-naturedly.

He was already on the steps pushing open the right-hand half of the door, which creaked mournfully on un-oiled hinges. Another couple of steps and another door and he found himself in a sparsely lit corridor. It was broad and high-ceilinged and stretched the entire length of the building.

On one side were private rooms and wards, the other was apparently reserved for lavatories and linen closets and examination rooms. On the wall was an old black pay phone of the kind that only cost ten öre to use. Rönn stared at an oval white enamel plate with the laconic inscription ENEMA and then went on to study the four people he could see from where he stood.

Two of them were uniformed policemen. One of these was stocky and solid and stood with feet apart and his arms at his sides and his eyes straight ahead. In his left hand he was holding an open notebook with a black cover. His colleague was leaning against the wall, head down, his gaze directed into an enamelled cast-iron washbasin with an old-fashioned brass tap. Of all the young men Rönn had encountered during his nine hours of overtime, this one looked to be easily the youngest. In his leather jacket and shoulder belt and apparently indispensable weaponry, he looked like a parody of a policeman. An older grey-haired woman with glasses sat collapsed in a wicker chair, staring apathetically at her white wooden clogs. She was wearing a white smock and had an ugly case of varicose veins on her pale calves. The quartet was completed by a man in his thirties. He had curly black hair and was biting his knuckles in irritation. He too was wearing a white coat and wooden-soled shoes.

The air in the corridor was unpleasant and smelled of disinfectant, vomit, or medicine, or maybe all three at once. Rönn sneezed suddenly and unexpectedly and, a little late, grabbed his nose between thumb and forefinger.

The only one to react was the policeman with the notebook. Without saying anything, he pointed to a tall door with light yellow crackled paint and a typewritten white card in a metal frame. The door was not quite closed. Rönn plucked it open without touching the handle. Inside there was another door. That one too was ajar, but opened inwards.

Rönn pushed it with his foot, looked into the room and gave a start. He let go of his reddish nose and took another look, this one more systematic.

‘My, my,’ he said to himself.

Then he took a step backwards, let the outer door swing back to its former position, put on his glasses and examined the name-plate.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

The policeman had put away the black notebook and had taken out his badge instead, which he now stood fingering as if it had been a rosary or an amulet.

Police badges were soon to be eliminated, Rönn remembered, irrationally. And with that, the long battle as to whether badges should be worn on the chest as forthright identification or hidden away in a pocket somewhere had come to a disappointing as well as surprising conclusion. They were simply done away with, replaced by ordinary ID cards, and policemen could safely go on hiding behind the anonymity of the uniform.

‘What's your name?’ he said out loud.

‘Andersson.’

‘What time did you get here?’

The policeman looked at his wristwatch.

‘At two sixteen. Nine minutes ago. We were in the area. At Odenplan.’

Rönn took off his glasses and glanced at the uniformed boy, who was light green in the face and vomiting helplessly into the sink. The older constable followed his look.

‘He's just a cadet,’ he said under his breath. ‘It's his first time out.’

‘Better give him a hand,’ said Rönn. ‘And send out a call for five or six men from the Fifth.’

‘The emergency bus from Precinct Five, yes sir,’ Andersson said, looking as if he were about to salute or snap to attention or some other inane thing.

‘Just a moment,’ Rönn said. ‘Have you seen anything suspicious around here?’

He hadn't put it too well perhaps, and the constable stared bewilderedly at the door to the sickroom.

‘Well, ah …’ he said evasively.

‘Do you know who that is? The man in there?’

‘Chief Inspector Nyman, isn't it?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Though you can't hardly tell by looking.’

‘No,’ Rönn said. ‘Not hardly.’

Andersson went out.

Rönn wiped the sweat from his forehead and considered what he ought to do.

For ten seconds. Then he walked over to the pay phone and dialled Martin Beck's home number.

‘Hi. It's Rönn. I'm at Mount Sabbath. Come on over.’