The Abominable Man Read Free Page B

They were as different as a brother and sister can be, but they’d always gotten along well.
    The redhead came with the check. 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 Österlånggatan. The stars were out and the air was quite chilly. A couple of drunken teen-agers 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 suited 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 toward 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 pretty 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 pretty 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 on the elevator, which had been installed when the building was renovated and was one of the few in the Old City. The apartment was completely modernized and consisted of a hall, a small kitchen, a bathroom and two rooms whose windows opened on a large open yard on the east. The rooms were snug and asymmetrical, with deep bay windows and low ceilings. The first of the two rooms was furnished withcomfortable 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 dialed 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 movie—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 elevator and whispered good night before closing the doors and going back into his apartment.
    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 neighbors. He sat down at the desk and drank the beer, which was