Part 11 (1/2)

h.e.l.lstrom must have heard their footsteps on the gravel through the open door of the toolshed. He came to the doorway and watched them guardedly as they approached.

He looked about forty-five, tall and powerfully built, and was standing quite still, his feet apart, his back slightly bowed.

His eyes were blue and half-closed, his features heavy and serious. His dark untidy hair was streaked with grey and his short sideburns were almost white. He was holding a plane in one hand and some curls of fight wood clung to the dirty blue of his coverall.

'Are we interrupting your work, Mr h.e.l.lstrom?' said sa.

The man shrugged his shoulders and glanced behind him. 'No,' he said. 'I was just planing some mouldings. They can wait'

'We'd like to talk to you,' said Martin Beck. 'We're from the police.'

'A policeman's already been here,' said h.e.l.lstrom. 'I don't think I've got anything else to say.'

sa got out her identification, but h.e.l.lstrom turned around without looking at it, went over and put the plane down on a workbench inside the door.

”There's very little to say about Mr Petrus,' he said. 'I hardly knew him, just worked for him.'

'You have a daughter, haven't you?' said Martin Beck.

'Yes, but she doesn't live here any more. Has anything happened to her?' He was standing half-turned away from them, fiddling with the tools on the bench.

'Not that we know of. We'd just like to talk with you about her,' said Martin Beck. 'Is there anywhere we can go to talk in peace and quiet?'

'We can go to my place,' said h.e.l.lstrom. 'I'll just get this thing off.'

sa and Martin Beck waited while the man took off his coverall and hung it up on a nail. Under the coverall he was wearing blue jeans and a black s.h.i.+rt with the sleeves rolled up. He had a wide leather belt round his hips, with a large bra.s.s buckle in the shape of a horseshoe.

It had stopped raining, but heavy drops were splas.h.i.+ng through the branches of a large chestnut tree by the house.

The outside door was not locked. h.e.l.lstrom opened it and waited on the steps while sa and Martin Beck stepped into the hall. Then he went ahead of them into the living room.

The room was not large and they could see into the bedroom through a half-open door. Apart from the little kitchen, which they had seen from the hall, the house had no more rooms. A sofa and two unmatched armchairs filled almost the whole of the living room. An old-fas.h.i.+oned television set stood in the corner, and along one wall was a home-made bookcase, half-filled with books.

While sa went over and sat on the sofa and h.e.l.lstrom vanished into the kitchen, Martin Beck looked at the t.i.tles of the books. There were a number of cla.s.sics, among them Dostoyevsky, Balzac and Strindberg, as well as a surprising amount of poetry - several anthologies and poetry-club editions, but also hardback editions of authors like Nils Ferlin, Elmer Diktonius and Edith Sddergran.

h.e.l.lstrom turned on the taps in the kitchen and a few moments later appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands on a dirty kitchen towel. 'Shall I make some tea?' he said. 'It's all I have to offer. I don't drink coffee myself, so there isn't any here.'

'Don't put yourself to any trouble,' said sa.

'I was going to have some myself,' said h.e.l.lstrom.

'In that case, tea would be nice,' said sa.

h.e.l.lstrom returned to the kitchen .and Martin Beck sat down in one of the armchairs. An open book lay on the table. He turned it over and looked at the jacket. Sermon to the Dogs by Ralf Parland. Walter Petrus's gardener obviously had rather good and advanced tastes in literature.

h.e.l.lstrom brought mugs, a sugar bowl and a carton of milk out to the table, went back to the kitchen and returned with the teapot. He sat down in the other armchair and took a flattened packet of cigarettes and a book of matches out of his jeans pocket. When he had lit a cigarette, he poured out the tea and looked at Martin Beck. 'You want to talk about my daughter, you said.'

'Yes,' said Martin Beck. 'Where is she?'

'The last time I heard from her, she was in Copenhagen.'

'What does she do there?' asked sa. 'Does she work?'

'I don't really know,' said h.e.l.lstrom, looking at the cigarette between his sunburnt fingers.

'When was it that you heard from her?' Martin Beck asked.

h.e.l.lstrom did not answer at once. 'I didn't really hear from her at all,' he said finally. 'But I was down to visit her a while back. In the spring.'

'And what was she doing then?' asked sa. 'Has she met a man there?'

h.e.l.lstrom smiled bitterly. 'You could say that. Not just one, either.'

'Do you mean she's...'

'She's a wh.o.r.e? Yes,' he interrupted, almost spitting out the words. 'She walks the streets, in other words. That's what she lives on. I got the social services down there to help me find her, and she was pretty down. She didn't want anything to do with me. I tried to get her to come home with me, but she wouldn't'

He paused and fingered his cigarette.

'She'll be twenty soon, so no one can stop her from living her own life,' he said.

'You brought her up on your own, didn't you?'

Martin Beck sat in silence, letting sa handle the conversation.

'Yes, my wife died when Kiki was only a month old. We didn't live here then. We lived in town.'

sa nodded and he went on.

'Mona took her own life and the doctor said it was because of some sort of depression after the baby was born. I didn't understand anything: Of course, I saw she was depressed and down, but I thought that was because of money worries and the future and all that, what with having a child?

'What sort of work did you do then?'

'I was a church caretaker. I was twenty-three, but I didn't have any kind of education. My father was a dustman, and my mother did cleaning jobs now and then. There was nothing for me to do but start work as soon as I finished school. I was an errand boy and worked in a warehouse and that sort of thing. Things were tight at home and I had several younger brothers and sisters, so we needed the money.'

'How did you come to be a gardener?'

'I worked on a farm in Svartsjdland. The old boy who owned it was all right and took me on as an apprentice. He paid for me to learn to drive and get my licence, too. He had a lorry and I drove vegetables and fruit to Klara market'

h.e.l.lstrom took a last draw on his cigarette and then stubbed it out in the ashtray, 'How did you manage to take care of the child and work at the same time?' asked sa, while Martin Beck drank his tea and listened.

'I had to,' said h.e.l.lstrom. 'When she was little, I took her with me everywhere. Later, when she went to school, she had to manage alone in the afternoons. It wasn't the best way to bring up a child, but I had no choice.'

He sipped his tea and added bitterly, 'You can see the result'

'When did you come here to Djursholm?' sa asked.

'I got this job ten years ago. A free house if I looked after the garden here. And then I got gardening jobs at several other places, so we managed pretty well. I thought this neighbourhood would be good for Kiki - a good school and fine friends. But I suppose it wasn't all that easy for her. All her school friends had rich parents who lived in big houses and she was ashamed of the way we lived. She never brought anyone home here.'

'The Petrus family has a daughter about the same age. Did the girls get along? They were neighbours, after all.'