The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö

turning her head. “Let’s go for a ride.”
    The patrolman looked at the officer, who shrugged his shoulders, amused. Then he put on his cap and followed her out.
    “She seemed right at home,” said Martin Beck.
    “Oh yeah, this isn’t the first time. And certainly not the last.”
    He sat down at the table and started cleaning his pipe into an ashtray.
    “That was nasty, that business with Nyman,” he said. “How did it happen, actually?”
    Martin Beck told him briefly what had happened.
    “Ugh,” the officer said. “Whoever did it must be a raving lunatic. But why Nyman?”
    “You knew Nyman, didn’t you?” Martin Beck asked him.
    “Not very well. He wasn’t the sort of person you knew well.”
    “He was here on special assignment of course. When did he come here to the Fourth?”
    “They gave him an office here three years ago. February ’68.”
    “What sort of a person was he?” Martin Beck asked.
    The officer filled his pipe and lit it before answering.
    “I don’t really know how to describe him. You knew him too, I suppose? Ambitious you could certainly call him, stubborn, not much of a sense of humor. Pretty conservative in his views. The younger fellows were a little afraid of him, in spite of the fact they didn’t really have anything to do with him. He could be pretty stern. But like I said, I didn’t know him at all well.”
    “Did he have any particular friends on the force?”
    “Not here anyway. I don’t think he and our inspector got along very well. But otherwise I don’t know.”
    The man thought for a moment and then looked at Martin Beck oddly—appealingly and conspiratorially.
    “Well …” he said.
    “What?”
    “I mean I guess he still had friends at headquarters, didn’t he?”
    Martin Beck didn’t answer. Instead he put another question.
    “What about enemies?”
    “Don’t know. He probably had enemies, but hardly here, and certainly not to the point that …”
    “Do you know if he’d been threatened?”
    “No, he didn’t exactly confide in me. Although for that matter …”
    “Yes, what?”
    “Well, for that matter, Nyman wasn’t the kind of man who let himself be threatened.”
    The telephone rang inside the glass cubicle and the officer went in and answered it. Martin Beck walked over and stood by the window with his hands in his pockets. The station house was quiet. The only sounds to be heard were the voice of the man on the telephone and the dry coughing of the old policeman at the switchboard. Presumably things were not so quiet in the arrest section on the floor below.
    Martin Beck suddenly realized how tired he was. His eyes ached from lack of sleep, and his throat from way too many cigarettes.
    The phone call looked like it was going to be a long one. Martin Beck yawned and leafed through the morning paper, read the headlines and an occasional picture caption but without really seeing what he read. Finally he folded up the paper, walked over and knocked on the window to the cubicle, and when the man on the phone looked up he made signs indicating he was about toleave. The officer waved and went on talking into the receiver.
    Martin Beck lit another cigarette and thought distractedly that it must be his fiftieth since that first cigarette of the morning almost twenty-four hours ago.

    10    
    If you really want to be sure of getting caught, the thing to do is kill a policeman.
    This truth applies in most places and especially in Sweden. There are plenty of unsolved murders in Swedish criminal history, but not one of them involves the murder of a policeman.
    When a member of their own troop meets with misfortune, the police seem to acquire many times their usual energy. All the complaints about lack of manpower and resources stop, and suddenly it’s possible to mobilize several hundred men for an investigation that would normally have occupied no more than three or four.
    A man who lays hands on a policeman always gets caught.