Cop Killer Read online

  Praise for

  MAJ SJÖWALL and

  PER WAHLÖÖ

  “Sjöwall and Wahlöö continue to be tops for discriminating crime book readers.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Ingenious.… Their mysteries don’t just read well; they reread even better.… The writing is lean, with mournful undertones.”

  —The New York Times

  “Martin Beck is as always very believable: this, we feel, is what it must mean to be an honest and intelligent policeman in modern Sweden, or anywhere else.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement (London)

  “In the hands of Wahlöö and Sjöwall … the police story—with no loss of suspense or action—[has been] brilliantly fashioned into a sharp instrument for social commentary.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Edge-of-the-seat suspense.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  THE MARTIN BECK MYSTERY SERIES

  by

  MAJ SJÖWALL and

  PER WAHLÖÖ

  Roseanna

  The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

  The Man on the Balcony

  The Laughing Policeman

  The Fire Engine That Disappeared

  Murder at the Savoy

  The Abominable Man

  The Locked Room

  Cop Killer

  The Terrorists

  MAJ SJÖWALL and

  PER WAHLÖÖ

  COP KILLER

  Maj Sjöwall and her husband, Per Wahlöö, wrote ten Martin Beck mysteries. Mr. Wahlöö, who died in 1975, was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and wrote numerous radio and television plays, film scripts, short stories, and novels. Maj Sjöwall is a poet. The books, together known as “The Story of Crime,” remain one of the greatest series of crime stories ever written.

  SECOND VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, JULY 2010

  Translation copyright © 1975 by Random House, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2010 by Liza Marklund

  Introduction translation copyright © 2010 by Sarah Death

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Sweden as Polismördaren by P.A. Norstedt & Söner Forlag, Stockholm, in 1974. Copyright © 1974 by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States in slightly different form by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1975, and subsequently published in paperback by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1978.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Sjöwall, Maj, 1935–

  Cop Killer.

  I. Wahlöö, Per, 1926– joint author. II. Title.

  PZ4.S61953C03 [PT9876.29.J63] 839.7′3′74 74-26197

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74432-6

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Other Books by This Author

  INTRODUCTION

  I still recall the first time I read Cop Killer. Like Maj and Per’s other detective novels, it has been with me for as long as I can remember. The Martin Beck series is part of my childhood, my adolescence, the way I relate to Sweden and to reality.

  As the years pass, I have returned to these books over and over again. My most recent rereading was last Christmas, when I lugged the whole series with me in paperback on a round-the-world holiday. I read Cop Killer on Rarotonga, one of the Cook Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean. It worked as well there as it does everywhere else.

  Since starting to write crime fiction myself, I have often been asked during interviews by journalists about the particular brand of detective story that has developed in Scandinavia.

  For me, the modern police novel was actually created by Maj and Per in their tales of Martin Beck, Gunvald, Kollberg, and the rest. As a team, Sjöwall and Wahlöö set a completely new standard for fiction that dealt with crime in society; they brought together literary quality and dramatically skillful plotting—plus a social commitment that lent a real spark to their writing. The reason for their great success is, I think, the combination of these three elements, of which the third is perhaps the most crucial.

  The Scandinavian countries, and perhaps Sweden above all, have long had an ambivalent attitude where their own excellence is concerned. There is a streak of self-righteousness in us that is only partially justified. It is certainly true that our standard of living is the highest in the world, our infant mortality rate low, our proportion of women in politics high: we are extremely fortunate. At the same time, there are obvious cracks in the Swedish social democratic ideal of the “People’s Home,” and they have been there for a long time.

  Segregation is growing, the class divide is widening; we live in a violent society. Which other country in the Western world has seen two of its political leaders murdered in public places in the last twenty years? None except Sweden. You run a greater risk of being robbed in Stockholm than in New York, and violence against women is more extreme in Sweden than in Spain. Yet we still like to tell the world about our own idyllic superiority. The Swedish model continues to be marketed as a splendid, utopian alternative to the other nations on the planet: If everybody did as we do, the world’s problems would be solved.

  There, in the gap between utopia and reality, Maj and Per found a truth that they as authors became tremendously interested in investigating—and their readers in sharing.

  The books, each subtitled “The Story of Crime,” were written in those years of political awareness in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They starkly highlighted the discrepancy between society’s wishful visions and the real lives of the ordinary people, revealing the consequences of society’s failure.

  The pair have been followed by a succession of Scandinavian crime writers working in the same tradition and with the same ambition: Jan Guillou, Henning Mankell, Anne Holt, and me, to name but a few. The basic form is inspired in itself. No man is an island: all crimes are the result of a society shaped by the human beings of whom it is composed. For that reason, crime fiction is arguably the ultimate form for political or socially probing novels.

  The crime novel is nearly always a very distinct representation of the time in which it is set. It is in the nature of the genre for the narrative to be built up largely of detail. In order to solve the crime, the hero, like th
e reader, has to focus simultaneously on the broad and the narrow, on the sublime and the concrete.

  Cop Killer is the penultimate part of the Sjöwall and Wahlöo series. It was first published in 1974 and gives us a vibrant, palpable sense of time and place.

  Yet it also has an extremely modern feel. What strikes me in reading it once again are the ultra-topical issues: the distribution of resources in society; the consequences of crime and punishment; what exclusion and prejudice do to us as human beings.

  What’s more, it contains scenarios that are uncannily true to life, virtual predictions of events that were to follow, of which the authors were entirely unaware.

  In one scene in the novel, a cop killer in a stolen car is chased across Sweden. He and his sidekick have committed a burglary and the car is full of stolen goods. They are stopped by the police, shots are fired and a police officer dies. The murderer escapes in his car. He breaks his journey in the very small town of Malexander in the province of Östergötland, in the middle of nowhere, before driving on to Stockholm.

  This all takes place, in the novel that is, in the early 1970s.

  A full twenty-five years later, on May 28, 1999, three bank robbers were pursued along the same route as that taken by Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s characters. The police caught up with them in Malexander, and the robbers opened fire. Two policemen were murdered, and the men drove on toward Stockholm.

  A subsequent chase in the novel also bears an eerie resemblance to real events more than thirty years later. On the night of July 28, 2004, one of the Malexander police murderers escaped with some other inmates from Hall prison outside Stockholm. Their attempted flight proved every bit as incompetent as the cop killer’s in the novel: the escapees had not brought enough water with them, and got severely dehydrated in the summer heat. They were hungry and exhausted. It all ended in an argument over which of them should carry the map and compass, and they were easily recaptured. The crazily disproportionate police response was exactly the same as that described in the novel.

  All of this, taken together, is somehow comforting. Crimes have happened before. The police have made a mess of things many times in the past. In spite of that, the sun did rise again this morning. There, I think, lies the essence of the crime novel.

  —Liza Marklund

  1

  She reached the bus stop well ahead of the bus, which would not be along for half an hour yet. Thirty minutes of a person’s life is not an especially long time. Besides, she was used to waiting and was always early. She thought about what she would make for dinner, and a little about what she looked like—her usual idle thoughts.

  By the time the bus came, she would no longer have any thoughts at all. She had only twenty-seven minutes left to live.

  It was a pretty day, clear and gusty, with a touch of early autumn chill in the wind, but her hair was too well processed to be affected by the weather.

  What did she look like?

  Standing there by the side of the road this way, she might have been in her forties, a rather tall, sturdy woman with straight legs and broad hips and a little secret fat that she was very much afraid might show. She dressed mostly according to fashion, often at the expense of comfort, and on this blustery fall day she was wearing a bright green 1930s coat, nylon stockings, and thin brown patent leather boots with platform soles. She was carrying a small square handbag with a large brass clasp slung over her left shoulder. This too was brown, as were her suede gloves. Her blond hair had been well sprayed, and she was carefully made up.

  She didn’t notice him until he stopped. He leaned over and threw open the passenger door.

  “Want a lift?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, a little flurried. “Sure. I didn’t think …”

  “What didn’t you think?”

  “Well, I didn’t expect to get a ride. I was going to take the bus.”

  “I knew you’d be here,” he said. “And it’s not out of my way, as it happens. Jump in, now, look alive.”

  Look alive. How many seconds did it take her to climb in and sit down beside the driver? Look alive. He drove fast, and they were quickly out of town.

  She was sitting with her handbag in her lap, slightly tense, flustered perhaps, or at least somewhat surprised. Whether happily or unhappily it was impossible to say. She didn’t know herself.

  She looked at him from the side, but the man’s attention seemed wholly concentrated on the driving.

  He swung off the main road to the right, but then turned again almost immediately. The same procedure was repeated, and the road grew steadily worse. It was questionable whether it could be called a road any more or not.

  “What are you going to do?” she said, with a frightened little giggle.

  “You’ll find out.”

  “Where?”

  “Here,” he said and braked to a stop.

  Ahead of him he could see his own wheeltracks in the moss. They were not many hours old.

  “Over there,” he said with a nod. “Behind the woodpile. That’s a good place.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I never kid about things like that.”

  He seemed hurt or upset by the question.

  “But my coat,” she said.

  “Leave it here.”

  “But …”

  “There’s a blanket.”

  He climbed out, walked around, and held the door for her.

  She accepted his help and took off the coat. Folded it neatly and placed it on the seat beside her handbag.

  “There.”

  He seemed calm and collected, but he didn’t take her hand as he walked slowly toward the woodpile. She followed along behind.

  It was warm and sunny behind the woodpile and sheltered from the wind. The air was filled with the buzzing of flies and the fresh smell of greenery. It was still almost summer, and this summer had been the warmest in the weather bureau’s history.

  It wasn’t actually an ordinary woodpile but rather a stack of beech logs, cut in sections and piled about six feet high.

  “Take off your blouse.”

  “Yes,” she said shyly.

  He waited patiently while she undid the buttons.

  Then he helped her off with the blouse, gingerly, without touching her body.

  She was left standing with the garment in one hand, not knowing what to do with it.

  He took it from her and placed it carefully over the edge of the pile of logs. An earwig zigzagged across the fabric.

  She stood before him in her skirt, her breasts heavy in the skin-colored bra, her eyes on the ground, her back against the even surface of sawed timber.

  The moment had come to act, and he did so with such speed and suddenness that she never had time to grasp what was happening. Her reactions had never been especially quick.

  He grabbed the waistband at her navel with both hands and ripped open her skirt and her pantyhose in a single violent motion. He was strong, and the fabric gave instantly, with a rasping snarl like the sound of old canvas being torn. The skirt fell to her calves, and he jerked her pantyhose and panties down to her knees, then pulled up the left cup of her bra so that her breast flopped down, loose and heavy.

  Only then did she raise her head and look into his eyes. Eyes that were filled with disgust, loathing, and savage delight.

  The idea of screaming never had time to take shape in her mind. For that matter, it would have been pointless. The place had been chosen with care.

  He raised his arms straight out and up, closed his powerful suntanned fingers around her throat, and strangled her.

  The back of her head was pressed against the pile of logs, and she thought: My hair. That was her last thought.

  He held his grip on her throat a little longer than necessary.

  Then he let go with his right hand and, holding her body upright with his left, he struck her as hard as he could in the groin with his right fist.

  She fell to the ground and lay among the musk
madder and last year’s leaves. She was essentially naked.

  A rattling sound came from her throat. He knew this was normal and that she was already dead.

  Death is never very pretty. In addition, she had never been pretty during her lifetime, not even when she was young.

  Lying there in the forest undergrowth, she was, at best, pathetic.

  He waited a minute or so until his breathing had returned to normal and his heart had stopped racing.

  And then he was himself again, calm and rational.

  Beyond the pile of logs was a dense windfall from the big autumn storm of 1968, and beyond that, a dense planting of spruce trees about the height of a man.

  He lifted her under the arms and was disgusted by the feel of the sticky, damp stubble in her armpits against the palms of his hands.

  It took some time to drag her through the almost impassable terrain of sprawling tree trunks and uptorn roots, but he saw no need to hurry. Several yards into the spruce thicket there was a marshy depression filled with muddy yellow water. He shoved her into it and tramped her limp body down into the ooze. But first he looked at her for a moment. She was still tanned from the sunny summer, but the skin on her left breast was pale and flecked with light-brown spots. As pale as death, one might say.

  He walked back to get the green coat and wondered for a moment what he should do with her handbag. Then he took the blouse from the timber pile, wrapped it around the purse, and carried everything back to the muddy pool. The color of the coat was rather striking, so he fetched a suitable stick and pushed the coat, the blouse, and the handbag as deep as he could down into the mud.

  He spent the next quarter of an hour collecting spruce branches and chunks of moss. He covered the pool so thoroughly that no casual passerby would ever notice the mudhole existed.

  He studied the result for a few minutes and made several corrections before he was satisfied.

  Then he shrugged his shoulders and went back to where he was parked. He took a clean cotton rag from the floor and cleaned off his rubber boots. When he was done, he threw the rag on the ground. It lay there wet and muddy and clearly visible, but it didn’t matter. A cotton rag can be anywhere. It proves nothing and can’t be linked to anything in particular.