Martin Beck: The Terrorists - Part 7
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Part 7

The definitive medical report fixed Walter Petrus's death as having occurred between six and nine in the morning. There was no reason to doubt Maud Lundin's statement that he had been alive when she left home at half-past six. Neither sa Torell nor Martin Beck thought she had anything to do with the murder.

The fact that the front door had been unlocked had made it easy for someone to get into the house and surprise Petrus as he stood in the shower, but how the killer got there without being seen was more of a puzzle. Either he had come by car, which seemed the most likely, or by train, but it was strange that no one living nearby had noticed him. In an area where everyone knew one another, or at least knew their nearest neighbours and their cars, the chances of being seen ought to have been greatest during just that period between half-past six and nine in the morning. That was everyone's most active time - the men were on their way to work, the children were walking to school and the housewives were at home starting their cleaning or gardening.

Nevertheless, though the knocking on nearby doors went on for several days, until practically every inhabitant in that part of Rotebro had been questioned, it was established that no one had noticed anyone or anything that could be linked with the murder.

Parsson and his 'men', in fact mostly sa Torell, had begun working on the-theory that the killer lived in the neighbourhood, but they had not yet come across anyone who either knew Petrus or could have had a motive for killing him.

Martin Beck and Benny Skacke devoted their time to trying to clarify Walter Petrus's private life, professional activities and financial circ.u.mstances. The last of these was particularly difficult to shed any light on. Petrus appeared to have been involved in tax evasion on a major scale. His films were sold abroad, and he could be presumed to have fat accounts in Swiss banks. There was no doubt that he had juggled his accounts and tax declarations, or that he had used skilled legal advisers. Martin Beck knew nothing about the intricacies of such financial finagling and he was only too happy to let the experts in that .field try to clarify the picture.

Petrus Films Inc. had its office on Nybrogatan. The office, which had once been a residential apartment, had been lovingly renovated and consisted of six rooms and a kitchen. The three employees had an office each, and their modern office furniture looked strangely out of place surrounded by tiled stoves, oak panels and plasterwork ceilings. Walter Petrus himself had presided from behind an enormous desk of jacaranda wood in a large, beautiful corner room with high windows. There was also a screening room with seats for ten people, and another room which appeared to be used as an archive and storeroom.

Martin Beck and Skacke spent a couple of mornings in the screening room trying to a.s.sess the results of Walter Petrus's cinematic activities. They watched one film from beginning to end, plus extracts from seven others, each one more appalling than the last. Skacke wriggled with embarra.s.sment at first, but after a while started yawning. The films were all technically very bad, and for Maud Lundin to have called them 'artistic' was not just an exaggeration but a downright lie. In this particular case she had not been honest, thought Martin Beck, unless she entirely lacked judgement The actors, if such a term could be used to describe the collection of obvious amateurs appearing on the screen, were for the most part naked. When any of them did wear clothes, it was only in order to remove them as quickly as possible.

Three teenage girls kept reappearing in all the films - sometimes separately and sometimes all together. One of them seemed painfully embarra.s.sed and glanced uncertainly into the lens every now and then as she wiggled her tongue and rolled her eyes and twisted her body like an eel to the obvious instructions of someone behind the camera. The young men were all blond - with the exception of one who was black - and well built. The props were minimal, most of the action taking place on the same old couch, which occasionally changed covers.

Only one of the films appeared to involve any kind of plot, and that was the one Maud Lundin had referred to - Love in the Midnight Sun. It had obviously been filmed in the islands outside Stockholm and began with the main character, a girl of fifteen or so, paddling out to an island in a canoe to celebrate midsummer in a traditional Swedish way. She had with her a picnic basket containing a bottle of aquavit, gla.s.ses, plates and some silver, a white linen tablecloth, a head of lettuce and a loaf of bread.

After carrying the basket and a fishing rod ash.o.r.e, she immediately took her clothes off, slowly and with strange writhing movements, her mouth open and her eyes downcast. Then she sat down at the water's edge with her legs apart and began masturbating with the handle of the fishing rod. After tossing her head and letting out a few groans, she adroitly cast the line and immediately landed an enormous dead salmon. Delighted with her catch, she jumped around the rocks for a while, stretching her legs, wriggling her hips and thrusting out her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She quickly built a gigantic bonfire of driftwood which happened to be lying about in a convenient heap on the sh.o.r.e, and placed the fish on a spit over the fire. Then she laid the tablecloth and poured aquavit into what looked like a champagne gla.s.s. Just as she was swallowing the drink, a naked blond youth appeared out of the sea. She invited him to join her in her meal, and between drinks - which they took from the same gla.s.s - they ate the salmon, which by now was smoked and thinly sliced. Night had fallen, although the sun was still high in the sky, and the young couple carried out a kind of ritual dance around the smoking bonfire. Then they wandered hand in hand towards the island's green meadows, found a convenient haystack and indulged in fifteen minutes of intercourse in twenty different positions. In the final scene, the two young people wandered out into the glittering sun-drenched sea. The end.

The sales manager of Petrus Films Inc. suggested that they might like to look at some additional films of the same type, such as l.u.s.t and Love in Sweden or Three Nights with Swedish Eva, but Martin Beck and Skacke had had enough and politely declined the invitation. They were told that Love in the Midnight Sun was the firm's biggest hit and had been sold to eight countries. The girl who starred in it was now in one of these countries, he could not remember which, Italy perhaps, to further her career. Mr Petrus had arranged an engagement for one of the other girls with a German company, the sales manager told them, so the girls had probably been richly rewarded over and above the thousand kronor that was the usual fee for the star part in a film.

Martin Beck left Skacke to continue rummaging in Petrus Films' dirty laundry and decided that it was time to go and visit the bereaved family. He had called the house in Djursholm on Friday, but had only been allowed to speak to the family doctor, who had said briefly and authoritatively that Mrs Petrus was not in a state to receive visitors, least of all policemen. The doctor gave him to understand that it was most callous and unfeeling of him not to leave the poor widow in peace at least over the weekend.

Now the weekend was over, it was Monday the tenth of July, and when Martin Beck came out on to Nybrogatan, the sun was shining. The summer was just beginning, holiday time had come, and the pavements were crowded with people in varying states of frenzy. He walked down the street towards ostermalm Square and when he got to the Seventh Division's new station, he went inside and up the stairs to use the telephone.

A woman answered at the Petrus house. She asked him to wait, returned after a long while and said that Mrs Petrus was prepared to receive him on condition that his visit be kept short.

He promised not to stay long, then he called a cab.

The house in Djursholm was surrounded by a large park-like garden and the driveway to the house was lined with tall poplars. The high wrought-iron gates were open and the cab driver asked if he was to drive in, but Martin Beck told him to stop outside the gates and he paid and got out.

As Martin Beck walked up the drive, he studied the villa and its surroundings. The hedge along the road was thick and high and carefully and artistically trimmed. Once inside the hedge, the drive divided and continued to the right towards a large garage. The enormous garden looked very well kept, the lawns had sharp edges where narrow gravel paths twisted among shrubs and flower beds, and to judge from the height of the poplars and the age of the fruit trees the whole thing must have been laid out many years before.

In that setting there was every reason to expect an ancient house of the type that was common in such wealthy areas, but the house Martin Beck was approaching along the freshly raked gravel path was a modern two-storey architectonic creation with a flat roof and gigantic windows.

A middle-aged woman in a black dress and white ap.r.o.n opened the door before he even had a chance to put his finger to the bell. She walked ahead of him in silence through a large hall, past a broad staircase, through two more rooms, and then stopped in a wide archway opening into a sunny room, the end wall of which was entirely gla.s.s.

The floor of light laminated pine was sunken and Martin Beck did not see the step, so he stumbled into the room where Walter Petrus's widow was waiting for him, lying in a deck chair in the corner by the gla.s.s wall. On the terrace outside were several similar chairs lined up as if on the sun deck of an ocean liner.

'Oopsie!' she said, as she waved away the black-clad woman as one waves away a fly.

As the woman turned to go, Mrs Petrus changed her mind and said, 'No, wait a minute.' She looked at Martin Beck. 'Would you like something to drink, Inspector? Coffee, tea, beer or perhaps a drink? I'll have a sherry myself.'

'Thank you,' said Martin Beck. 'A beer would taste good.'

'One beer and a large gla.s.s of sherry,' she said in commanding tones. 'And, Mrs Pettersson, perhaps you'd bring some of those Dutch cheese biscuits.'

Martin Beck considered the odd fact that Walter Petrus Pettersson's widow had the same name as her maid, or whatever this fortunately rare occupational group was called nowadays. They must also have been about the same age.

He had already dug out some facts about Mrs Petrus and knew, among other things, her last name had also been Pettersson before she married; that her Christian names were Kristina Elvira, though nowadays she called herself Chris; that she was fifty-seven years old; and that she had been married to Petrus for twenty-eight years. In her youth she had worked in an office and just before her marriage she had been a secretary in the firm that Petrus had been running at the time. Walter Petrus, film director, was a relatively new phenomenon; for many years he had been called Valter Pettersson and had dealt in inadequately renovated used cars, a lucrative but not particularly honest activity which harsher laws and stricter control of the trade had forced him to abandon.

Martin Beck was still standing in the middle of the room, looking at the woman in the deck chair. Sunburnt beneath her makeup, she had bleached hair and was wearing a black shantung blouse over well-tailored black linen trousers. She was very thin and her face looked harrowed and worn under the modern curly hairstyle.

He went up to her and she graciously held out a small wrinkled hand as he offered his condolences and apologized for having to intrude, phrases he seemed to have used hundreds of times in similar situations.

He did not really know what to do with himself - the deck chair stood by itself there in the corner. But finally she got up and went over to two enormous leather sofas placed in the middle of the room on either side of a long marble-topped table. She sat down in the corner of one sofa and Martin Beck sat down on the one opposite.

Outside the gla.s.s wall, which was equipped with sliding doors, there was a paved terrace and below that a swimming pool. Beyond the pool a large lawn sloped down towards a row of tall birches about fifty yards from the house. The lawn was thick and smooth and there were no trees, shrubs or flower beds here. Through the gauzy green of the birches he caught a glimpse of the blue surface of Great Varta.

'Yes, it's a lovely view, isn't it?' said Chris Petrus, following Martin Beck's gaze. 'It's a pity we don't own the lakeside plot as well. Then I'd have the birches cut down to see the water better.'

'Birches are pretty too,' said Martin Beck.

Mrs Pettersson came in and placed a tray on the table, handed Martin Beck a beer and put a large gla.s.s of sherry and the bowl of cheese biscuits in front of Mrs Petrus. Then she picked up the tray and left the room without a word.

Mrs Petrus raised her gla.s.s and nodded to Martin Beck before drinking. Then she put down the gla.s.s and said, 'We've always liked it so much here. When we bought the property six years ago, there was a dreadful old place here, but we had it demolished and built this house instead. One of Walter's acquaintances who is an architect designed it for us.'

Martin Beck was sure the old place had been pleasanter to live in. What he had seen of the house so far seemed bare and inhospitable, and the ultramodern and certainly extremely costly decor seemed designed more for show than for comfort and warmth.

'Isn't it cold in the winter with such large windows?' said Martin Beck conversationally.

'Oh, no, we've got infraheat in the ceiling and heating coils in the floor. On the terrace, too. And we're not here very much in the winter. We go to warmer climes - Greece or Algarve or Africa.'

Martin Beck had a feeling that the woman in front of him had not yet realized that a change had occurred in her life. Or perhaps the change had not been so great. She had lost her husband, but not his money. Perhaps she had even wished for his death. Practically everything can be bought for money, even murder.

'What was the relationship between you and your husband like?' he asked.

She looked at him in astonishment, as if she had thought all along that he'd come to talk about the house and the view and trips abroad.

'It was very good,' she said. 'We'd been married for twenty-eight years and we have three children. That alone is enough to keep a marriage together.'

'But it doesn't necessarily mean the marriage was happy,' said Martin Beck. 'Was it?'

'You get used to each other over the years, you overlook each other's faults and you adapt,' she said. 'Do you believe yourself that there is such a thing as a really happy marriage? Ours was free of friction at least, and neither one of us ever considered divorce.'

'Did you know very much about your husband's business?'

'Not a thing. The film company didn't interest me in the slightest and I never interfered in my husband's business affairs.'

'What did you think of the films your husband's company produced?'

'I've never seen them. Of course, I know what kind of films they are, but I'm not prejudiced and refuse to express opinions. Wally worked hard and did his best to give me and the children a decent life. Our eldest son is twenty-six. He's a naval officer and lives here when he's in Stockholm, but he's usually at sea or in Karlskrona. Pierre is twenty-two and has an artistic bent. He also wants to work in films, but times are bad and right now he's travelling around making contacts and gathering impressions. He has his room upstairs and lives at home when he's not abroad. I cabled his last address in Spain but haven't heard from him yet, so I don't even know if he has learned that his father is dead.'

She took a cigarette from a silver box on the table and lit it with a table lighter, also silver and of monstrous proportions.

'Then there's t.i.tti. She's only nineteen, but she's already doing very well as a photographer's model. She lives here at home part of the time, and part of the time in her little den in the Old City. She isn't at home at the moment, or else you could meet her. She's awfully pretty.'

'I'm sure she is,' said Martin Beck politely, thinking that if she was she must not take after her father.

'Even if you weren't interested in your husband's affairs, you must have met some of his business friends,' he went on.

Chris Petrus ran her fingers through her hair and said, 'Yes, I did. We often had dinner parties here for all kinds of film people. And then there were all the parties and receptions Wally had to go to, though lately I hardly ever went with him.'

'Why not?'

Mrs Petrus looked out the window. 'I didn't want to,' she said. 'There were always so many people I didn't know, and lots of young people with whom I had nothing in common. And Wally didn't think it was necessary for me to go. I have my own friends whom I prefer to be with.'

In other words Walter Petrus had hot wanted his fifty-seven-year-old wife with him at parties where he could meet teenage girls. He had been sixty-two, fat and ugly and impotent, and his reputation as a film producer had gradually grown shabbier and shabbier, although in some circles he still lived off a prizewinning production, generally known as ambitious and artistic. But the attraction of the film world for many young girls was so great that they were prepared for any sacrifice or degradation to enter it.

'I suppose you've had time to think about who might have killed your husband, Mrs Petrus,' said Martin Beck.

'I can only imagine it was someone who was utterly insane. It's terrible that he hasn't been caught yet.'

'There was no one close to him who could have had any reason to-'

She interrupted him, for the first time apparently upset. 'No one except an absolute maniac could have had any reason to do such a thing, and we have no lunatics among our friends. Whatever people thought of my husband, there was no one who hated him that much.'

'I didn't mean to criticize your husband or your friends,' said Martin Beck. 'I just wondered whether he might have been threatened or whether someone might possibly have felt he'd been badly treated -'

She interrupted him again. 'Wally didn't treat people badly. He was kind and did his best for all his employees. It was a tough and difficult world he worked in, and now and again you have to be ruthless to keep your head above water; he said that himself sometimes. But it's simply absurd to think he could have treated anyone that badly.'

She emptied her sherry gla.s.s, lit another cigarette, and Martin Beck waited for her to calm down.

He looked out through the gla.s.s wall. A man in blue work clothes was walking across the lawn.

'Someone's coming,' said Martin Beck.

Mrs Petrus glanced at the man. 'That's h.e.l.lstrom, our gardener,' she said.

The man in blue overalls turned right by the swimming pool and vanished from their sight 'Does anyone else work for you besides Mrs Pettersson and the gardener?'

'No. Mrs Pettersson looks after the housekeeping, and twice a week we have extra cleaning help. When we have dinner parties we hire staff, of course. And h.e.l.lstrom isn't just our gardener; he looks after several gardens in the neighbourhood. He doesn't live here, either. He lives in a small house on the grounds next door.'

'Does he take care of the car, too?'

She nodded. 'Wally hated driving, so h.e.l.lstrom had to be the chauffeur, too. Sometimes I'd be going into town at the same time as Wally, but I prefer to drive my own car, and Wally preferred the Bentley.'

'Didn't your husband ever drive himself?'

She fingered her gla.s.s and looked towards the doorway. Then she got up and said, 'I'm just going to call Mrs Pettersson. The only thing wrong with this house is that there's no bell to the kitchen.'

She went out and he heard her calling to Mrs Pettersson to bring the sherry decanter. Then she came back and sat down on the sofa.

Martin Beck waited with his next question until Mrs Pettersson had put the decanter on the table and gone. He took a sip of beer, which had begun to get warm and flat, and said, 'Did you know that your husband had relationships with other women, Mrs Petrus?'

She replied immediately, looking straight at him. 'Naturally I knew about his relationship with the woman he was with when he was killed. She had been his mistress for a year or two. I don't think he had any other relationships, one or two brief ones perhaps, but he was no longer a youngster. As I told you before, I'm not prejudiced and I let Wally live his life the way he wanted.'

'Have you ever met Maud Lundin?'

'No. And I don't want to. Wally had a certain taste for cheap women, and I presume Mrs Lundin is the type.'

'Have you yourself had relationships with other men?' asked Martin Beck.

She looked at him for a moment, then said, 'I don't think that has anything to do with it'

'But it has, or else I wouldn't have asked.'

'If you think that I've got a lover who killed Wally out of jealousy, then I can tell you you're wrong. I have in fact had a lover for several years, but he and Wally were good friends and my husband accepted our relationship as long as it was conducted discreetly. I'm not going to give you his name.'

'Maybe that won't be necessary,' said Martin Beck.

Chris Petrus ran the back of her hand across her forehead and closed her eyes. The gesture looked theatrical. He noticed that she had false eyelashes.

'Now I really must ask you to leave me in peace,' she said. 'I really don't enjoy sitting here discussing Wally's and my private life with a perfect stranger.'

'I'm sorry, but it's my job to try to find out whoever killed your husband So I have to ask indiscreet questions in order to get some idea of what could have caused his death.'

*You promised on the phone to keep it short,' she said plaintively.

'I won't bother you with any more questions now,' said Martin Beck. 'But I may have to come back. Or send one of my colleagues. In that case, I'll call you first'

'Yes, yes,' said Mrs Petrus impatiently.

He got up and again she graciously extended her hand.

As he went out through the archway, this time without stumbling over the step, he heard the gurgling of the decanter as she poured herself another sherry.

Mrs Pettersson must have been in the upper part of the house. He could hear her steps and the hum of the vacuum cleaner. Nor was there any sign of the gardener, and the garage doors were closed. As he went out through the gates, he saw that the gateposts were equipped with photocells, presumably connected to some signalling system up in the house. That explained why Mrs Pettersson had let him in without his having to ring the bell.

As he pa.s.sed the house next door, he saw h.e.l.lstrom, the gardener, through the ironwork of the gate. He stopped and considered going in to speak to him, but the man, who had been bending over doing something on the lawn, straightened up and walked quickly away. With a swishing sound, a sprinkler began to throw a fine cascade of water over the rich green gra.s.s.

Martin Beck continued along the road in the direction of the station. He was thinking now about Rhea and how he would describe the Petrus family to her when they met. He knew exactly what she would say.

The day after the midsummer holiday, a young man walked into the police station in Marsta and handed the duty officer a long, narrow, heavy object wrapped in newspaper.

Nineteen days had gone by since the murder in Rotebro and the investigation had produced very few results. The technical examination had brought out nothing remarkable or interesting, not even a fingerprint which did not belong to Walter Petrus himself, or to Maud Lundin and her friends, or to other people who had legitimate reasons for being in the house. The only thing that, might possibly have been linked to the killer was a blurred footprint outside the gla.s.s doors leading to the garden.

Innumerable questions had been asked of neighbours, members of the family, employees, friends and acquaintances; and the more extensive the material grew, the clearer the picture of Walter Petrus became. Behind a jovial and generous facade was a hard, unscrupulous man who was utterly ruthless when it came to pursuing his own ends. His unprincipled behaviour, especially in business, had earned him a great many antagonists, but the people closest to him, who might have been thought to have had sufficiently strong motives for killing him, all had alibis for the time of the crime.

Apart from his wife and children, there was no one who would gain financially from his death.

The duty officer handed the parcel to Chief Inspector Parsson who opened it, glanced at the contents and called the young man in.

'What is this, and why did you bring it to us?' he said, pointing to the iron bar which had been rolled up in the newspaper.

'I found it in Rotebro,' said the man. 'I thought maybe it might have something to do with the murder of that man Petrus. I read about it in the papers and it said the weapon hadn't been found. A friend of mine lives across the street from the house where it happened, and I slept over at his place last night We talked about the murder, of course, among other things, and when I found that thing this morning I thought it might be the murder weapon. Anyway, I thought it best to take it to the police.' He looked eagerly at Parsson and went on hesitantly: 'For safety's sake. You never know.'

Parsson nodded. A few days earlier a woman had sent a wrench through the post along with a letter accusing her neighbour of the murder. She had found the wrench in the neighbour's garage and since there was obviously blood on the tool and the neighbour had previously committed a murder, all the police had to do was come and take him away, she wrote. Parsson had investigated the matter and it turned out that the woman was neurotic and paranoid, and that she was quite convinced her neighbour had killed her cat, which had been missing for three months. It also turned out that the blood on the wrench was red paint The young man looked uncertainly at him and Parsson said in a friendly voice, "Thank you for coming. Do you think you could show us the place where you found it, if necessary?'