Per Wahloo – The Man on the Balcony (страница 6)

He had walked on the grass, following them with silent steps, and stood crouched behind the bushes less than a dozen yards away. He had carefully weighed the pros and cons. An attack appealed to his sense of humour, but on the other hand the girl had no handbag and also he might not be able to stop her from screaming, which in its turn might impede the practice of his profession. Besides, the boy looked stronger and broader across the shoulders than he had first thought, and anyway it wasn't at all certain that he had any money in his wallet. An attack seemed unwise, so he had crept away as silently as he had come. He was no Peeping Tom, he had more important things to do; in any case, he presumed there wasn't much more to see. Before long the young couple had left the park, now suitably far apart. They had crossed the street and entered a block of flats, the outside of which indicated stable middle-class respectability. In the doorway the girl had straightened her panties and bra and drawn a moistened fingertip along her eyebrows. The boy had combed his hair.

At half past eight his attention focused on the next two people. A red Volvo had stopped in front of the ironmongers at the street corner. Two men were in the front seat. One of them got out and went into the park. He was bareheaded and wore a beige-coloured raincoat. A few minutes later the second man had got out and gone into the park another way; he was wearing a cap and tweed jacket but had no overcoat. After about fifteen minutes they had returned to the car, from different directions and at an interval of some minutes. He had stood with his back to them, looking into the window of the ironmongers, and he had overheard clearly what they said.

‘Well?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What do we do now?’

‘Lill-Jans Wood?’

‘In this weather?’

‘Well…’

‘Okay. But then we have coffee.’

‘Okay.’

They had banged the car doors and driven off.

And now it was nearly nine o'clock and he sat on the bench waiting.

He caught sight of her as soon as she entered the park and knew at once which path she would take. A dumpy, middle-aged woman with overcoat, umbrella and large handbag. Looked promising. Maybe she kept a fruit and tobacco kiosk. He got up and put on the plastic raincoat, cut across the lawn and crouched down behind the bushes. She came on along the path, was almost abreast of him now – in five seconds, perhaps ten. With his left hand he drew the bandanna handkerchief up over his nose and thrust the fingers of his right hand into the brass knuckles. She was only a few yards away now. He moved swiftly and his footsteps on the wet grass were almost silent.

But only almost. He was still a yard behind the woman when she turned around, saw him and opened her mouth to scream. Unreflectingly he struck her across the mouth as hard as he could. He heard a crunch. The woman dropped her umbrella and staggered, then fell to her knees, clutching her handbag with both hands as if she had a baby to protect.

He struck her again, and her nose crunched under the brass knuckles. She fell back, her legs doubled under her, and didn't utter a sound. She was streaming with blood and seemed hardly conscious, but all the same he took a handful of sand from the path and strewed it over her eyes. At the same instant that he tore open the handbag her head flopped to one side, her jaw fell open, and she started to vomit.

Handbag, purse, a wrist watch. Not so bad.

The mugger was already on his way out of the park. As if she'd been protecting a baby, he thought. It could have been such a nice neat job. The silly old bitch.

A quarter of an hour later he was home. The time was half past nine on the evening of 9 June 1967, a Friday. Twenty minutes later it started to rain.

6

It rained all night but on Saturday morning the sun was shining again, hidden only now and then by the fluffy white clouds that floated across the clear blue sky. It was 10 June, the summer holidays had begun, and on Friday evening long lines of cars had crawled out of town on their way to country cottages, boat jetties and camping sites. But the city was still full of people who, as the weekend promised to be fine, would have to make do with the makeshift country life offered by parks and open-air swimming pools.

The time was a quarter past nine and a line was already waiting outside the pay window of the Vanadis Baths. Sun-thirsty Stockholmers, craving a swim, streamed up the paths leading from Sveavägen.

Two seedy figures crossed Frejgatan against the red light. One was dressed in jeans and a pullover, the other in black trousers and a brown jacket which bulged suspiciously over the left-hand breast pocket. They walked slowly, peering bleary-eyed against the sun. The man with the bulge in his jacket staggered and nearly bumped into a cyclist, an athletic man of sixty or so in a light-grey summer suit, with a pair of wet swimming trunks on the baggage carrier. The cyclist wobbled and had to put one foot to the ground.

‘Clumsy idiots!’ he shouted, as he rode pompously away.

‘Stupid old fool,’ the man with the jacket said. ‘Looks like a damned millionaire. Why, he might have knocked me down. I might have fallen and broken the bottle.’

He stopped indignantly on the pavement and the mere thought of how near he had been to disaster made him shudder and raise his hand to the bottle in his jacket.

‘And do you think he'd have paid for it? Not likely. Sitting pretty, he is, in a swanky apartment at Norr Mälarstrand with his fridge full of champagne, but the sonofabitch wouldn't think of paying for some poor bloke's bottle of booze that he'd broken. Dirty bastard!’

‘But he didn't break it,’ his friend objected quietly.

The second man was much younger; he took his irate companion by the arm and piloted him into the park. They climbed the slope, not towards the pool like the others but on past the gates. Then they turned off on to the path leading from Stefan's Church to the top of the hill. It was a steep pull and they were soon out of breath. Halfway up the younger man said:

‘Sometimes you can find a few coins in the grass behind the tower. If they've been playing poker there the night before. We might scrape enough together for another half-bottle before the off licence closes…’

It was Saturday and the off licences shut at one o'clock.

‘Not a hope. It was raining yesterday.’

‘So it was,’ the younger man said with a sigh.

The path skirted the fence of the bathing enclosure, which was teeming with bathers, some of them tanned so dark that they looked like Negroes, some of them real Negroes, but most of them pale after a long winter without even a week in the Canary Islands.

‘Hey, wait a minute,’ the younger man said. ‘Let's have a look at the girls.’

The older man walked on, saying over his shoulder:

‘Hell, no. Come on, I'm as thirsty as a camel.’

They went on up towards the water tower at the top of the park. Having rounded the gloomy building, they saw to their relief that they had the ground behind the tower to themselves. The older man sat down in the grass, took out the bottle and started unscrewing the cap. The younger man had continued to the top of the slope on the other side, where a red-painted wooden fence sagged.

‘Jocke!’ he shouted. ‘Let's sit here instead. In case anyone comes.’

Jocke got up, wheezing, and bottle in hand followed the other man, who had started down the slope.

‘Here's a good spot,’ the younger man called, ‘by these bush…’

He stopped dead and bent forward.

‘Christ!’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘Jesus Christ!’

Jocke came up behind him, saw the girl on the ground, turned aside and vomited.

She was lying with the top part of her body half hidden under a bush. Her legs, wide apart, were stretched out on the damp sand. The face, turned to one side, was bluish and the mouth was open. Her right arm was bent over her head and her left hand lay against her hip, palm upwards.

The fair, longish hair had fallen across her cheek. She was barefoot and dressed in a skirt and a striped cotton T-shirt that had slipped up, leaving her waist bare.

She had been about nine years old.

There was no doubt that she was dead.

The time was five minutes to ten when Jocke and his mate appeared at the ninth district police station in Surbrunnsgatan. They gave a rambling and nervous account of what they had seen in Vanadis Park to a police inspector called Granlund, who was duty officer. Ten minutes later Granlund and four policemen were on the spot.

Only twelve hours had passed since two of the four policemen had been called to an adjacent part of the park, where yet another brutal robbery had taken place. As nearly an hour had passed between the assault and the time it was reported, everyone had taken it for granted that the assailant had made himself scarce. They had therefore not examined the area closely and couldn't say whether the girl's body had been there at that time or not.

The five policemen established the fact that the girl was dead and that as far as they could tell she had been strangled. That was about all they could do for the moment.