The Abominable Man Read Free Page A

hissing noise came from the open windpipe.
    Nothing more.

    3    
    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 figure 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 tobaccofrom 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 Homicide 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 blond 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 check. 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 inwith a friend even before she was out of high 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 day before yesterday,” she said. “I was hoping you’d come too, but I couldn’t get hold of you.”
    “No, I was in Orebro 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.