The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö Read Free Book Online Page B

nowhere to be seen, but the patrolman was still standing at the foot of the steps.
    Martin Beck nodded to him and started walking toward the parking lot.
    The center of Stockholm had been subjected to sweeping and violent changes in the course of the last ten years. Entire districts had been leveled and new ones constructed. The structure of the city had been altered: streets had been broadened and freeways built. What wasbehind 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. In the heart of the city it had not been enough to tear down ninety percent of the buildings and completely obliterate the original street plan, violence had been visited on the natural topography itself.
    Stockholm’s inhabitants looked on with sorrow and bitterness as serviceable and irreplaceable old apartment houses were razed to make way for sterile office buildings. Powerless, they let themselves be deported to distant suburbs while the pleasant, lively neighborhoods where they had lived and worked were reduced to rubble. The inner city became a clamorous, all but impassable construction site from which the new city slowly and relentlessly arose with its broad, noisy traffic arteries, its shining façades of glass and light metal, its dead surfaces of flat concrete, its bleakness and its desolation.
    In this frenzy of modernization, the city’s police stations seemed to have been completely overlooked. All the station houses in the inner city were old-fashioned and the worse for wear, and in most cases, since the force had been enlarged over the years, crowded. In the Fourth Precinct, where Martin Beck was on his way, this lack of space was one of the primary problems.
    By the time he stepped out of the taxi in front of the Klara police station on Regeringsgatan, it had begun to get light. The sun would come up, there was still not a cloud in the sky, and it promised to be a pretty though rather chilly day.
    He walked up the stone steps and pushed open the door. To the right was the switchboard, for the moment unmanned, and a counter behind which stood an older, gray-haired policeman. He had spread out the morning paper and was resting on his elbows as he read. WhenMartin Beck came in he straightened up and took off his glasses.
    “Why it’s Inspector Beck, up and about at this time of the morning,” he said. “I was just looking to see if the morning papers had anything about Inspector Nyman. It sounds like a very nasty business.”
    He put on his glasses again, licked his thumb and turned a page in the paper.
    “It doesn’t look like they had time to get it in,” he went on.
    “No,” said Martin Beck. “I don’t suppose they did.”
    The Stockholm morning papers went to press early these days and had probably been ready for distribution even before Nyman was murdered.
    He walked past the desk and into the duty room. It was empty. The morning papers lay on a table along with a couple of overflowing ashtrays and some coffee mugs. Through a window into one of the interrogation rooms he could see the officer in charge sitting talking to a young woman with long blond hair. When he caught sight of Martin Beck he stood up, said something to the woman and came out of the glass cubicle. He closed the door behind him.
    “Hi,” he said. “Is it me you’re looking for?”
    Martin Beck sat down at the short end of the table, pulled an ashtray toward him and lit a cigarette.
    “I’m not looking for anyone in particular,” he said. “But have you got a minute?”
    “Can you wait just a moment?” the other man said. “I just want to get this woman sent over to Criminal.”
    He disappeared and returned a few minutes later with a radio patrolman, picked up an envelope from the desk and handed it to him. The woman stood up, hung her purse on her shoulder and walked quickly toward the door.
    “Come on, big boy,” she said without