The Abominable Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

routine—going to the Peace with his daughter, eating, drinking, getting undressed, pottering with a ship model, going to bed with a book. And then suddenly rushing off to inspect a slaughtered chief inspector of police. The worst part was that he felt that way himself. He never allowed himself to be taken aback, except by his own emotional coolness.
    It was now three ten in the morning and he sat on his haunches beside the bed and surveyed the body, coldly and appraisingly.
    “Yes, it’s Nyman,” he said.
    “Yes, I guess it is.”
    Rönn stood poking among the objects on the table. All at once he yawned and put his hand guiltily to his mouth.
    Martin Beck threw him a quick glance.
    “Have you got some sort of timetable?”
    “Yes,” Rönn said.
    He pulled out a small notebook where he’d made some industrious jottings in a tiny, stingy hand. Put on his glasses and rattled it off in a monotone.
    “An assistant nurse opened those doors at ten minutesafter two. Hadn’t heard or seen anything unusual. Making a routine check on the patients. Nyman was dead then. She dialed 90-000 at two eleven. The patrolmen in the radio car got the alarm at two twelve. They were at Odenplan and made it here in between three and four minutes. They reported to Criminal at two seventeen. I got here at two twenty-two. Called you at two twenty-nine. You got here at sixteen minutes to three.”
    Rönn looked at his watch.
    “It’s now eight minutes to three. When I arrived he’d been dead at the most half an hour.”
    “Is that what the doctor said?”
    “No, that’s my own conclusion, so to speak. The warmth of the body, coagulation—”
    He stopped, as if it had been presumptuous to mention his own observations.
    Martin Beck rubbed the bridge of his nose thoughtfully with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.
    “So then everything happened very fast,” he said.
    Rönn didn’t answer. He seemed to be thinking about something else.
    “Well,” he said after a while, “you understand why it was I called you. Not because—”
    He stopped, seeming somehow distracted.
    “Not because?”
    “Not because Nyman was a chief inspector, but because … well, because of this.”
    Rönn gestured vaguely toward the body.
    “He was butchered.”
    He paused for a second and then came up with a new conclusion.
    “I mean, whoever did this must be raving mad.”
    Martin Beck nodded.
    “Yes,” he said. “It looks that way.”

    7    
    Martin Beck was beginning to feel ill at ease. The sensation was vague and hard to trace, somewhat like the sneaking fatigue when you’re falling asleep over a book and go on reading without turning any pages.
    He’d have to make an effort to gather his wits and get a grip on these slippery apprehensions.
    Closely related to this lurking sensation of impotence, there was another feeling he couldn’t seem to get rid of.
    A sense of danger.
    That something was about to happen. Something that had to be warded off at any price. But he didn’t know what, and still less how.
    He’d had such feelings before, if only at long intervals. His colleagues tended to laugh off this phenomenon and call it intuition.
    Police work is built on realism, routine, stubbornness and system. It’s true that a lot of difficult cases are cleared up by coincidence, but it’s equally true that coincidence is an elastic concept that mustn’t be confused with luck or accident. In a criminal investigation, it’s a question of weaving the net of coincidence as fine as possible. And experience and industry play a larger role there than brilliant inspiration. A good memory and ordinary common sense are more valuable qualities than intellectual brilliance.
    Intuition has no place in practical police work.
    Intuition is not even a quality, any more than astrology and phrenology are sciences.
    And still it was there, however reluctant he was toadmit it, and there had been times when it seemed to have put him on the right