The Abominable Man Read Online Free PDF

the curly black hair.
    “Is there a psychiatric ward here?”
    “Nix verstehen,”
the doctor said.
    Rönn put on his glasses and examined the plastic name badge on the doctor’s white coat.
    Sure enough, there was his name.
    DR. ÜZK ÜKÖCÖTÜPZE.
    “Oh,” he said to himself.
    Put away his glasses and waited.

    6    
    The room was fifteen feet long, ten feet wide, and almost twelve feet high. The colors were very drab—ceiling a dirty white and the plastered walls an indefinite grayish yellow. Gray-white marble tiles on the floor. Light gray window-frames and door. In front of the window hung heavy pale-yellow damask drapes and, behind them, thin white cotton curtains. The iron bed was white, likewise the sheets and pillowcase. The night table was gray and the wooden chair light brown. The paint on the furniture was worn, and on the rough walls it was crackled with age. The plaster on the ceiling was flaking and in several places there were light brown spots where moisture had seeped through. Everything was old but very clean. On the table was a nickel silver vase with seven pale red roses. Plus a pair of glasses and a glasses case, a transparent plastic beaker containing two small white tablets, a little white transistor radio, a half-eaten apple, and a tumbler half full of some bright yellow liquid. On the shelf below lay a pile of magazines, four letters, a tablet of lined paper, a shiny Waterman pen with ballpoint cartridges in four different colors, and some loose change—to be exact, eight ten-öre pieces, twotwenty-five-öre pieces, and six one-crown coins. The table had two drawers. In the upper one were three used handkerchiefs, a bar of soap in a plastic box, toothpaste, toothbrush, a small bottle of after-shave, a box of cough drops, and a leather case with a nail clipper, file and scissors. The other contained a wallet, an electric razor, a small folder of postage stamps, two pipes, a tobacco pouch and a blank picture postcard of the Stockholm city hall. There were some clothes hanging over the back of the straight chair—a gray cotton coat, pants of the same color and material, and a knee-length white shirt. Underwear and socks lay on the seat, and next to the bed stood a pair of slippers. A beige bathrobe hung on the clothes hook by the door.
    There was only one completely dissident color in the room. And that was a shocking red.
    The dead man lay partly on his side between the bed and the window. The throat had been cut with such force that the head had been thrown back at an angle of almost ninety degrees and lay with its left cheek against the floor. The tongue had forced its way out through the gaping incision and the victim’s broken false teeth stuck out between the mutilated lips.
    As he fell backwards a thick stream of blood had pumped out through the carotid artery. This explained the crimson streak across the bed and the splashes of blood on the flower vase and night table.
    On the other hand it was the wound in the midriff that had soaked the victim’s shirt and provided the enormous pool of blood around the body. A superficial inspection of this wound indicated that someone, with a single blow, had cut through the liver, bile ducts, stomach, spleen and pancreas. Not to mention the aorta.
    Virtually all the blood in the body had welled out in the course of a few seconds. The skin was bluish whiteand seemed almost transparent, where, that is, it could be seen at all, for example on the forehead and parts of the shins and feet.
    The lesion on the torso was about ten inches long and wide open; the lacerated organs had pressed out between the sliced edges of the peritoneum.
    The man had virtually been cut in two.
    Even for people whose job it was to linger at the scenes of macabre and bloody crimes, this was strong stuff.
    But Martin Beck’s expression hadn’t changed since he entered the room. To an outside observer it would have seemed almost as if everything were part of the