Read Online The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö - Free Book Online Page B

the Violence Division in Stockholm, and higher up the ladder he would never go. As a matter of fact it was odd he hadn’t been fired already. His colleagues thought him peculiar, and they almost all disliked him. He himself detested not only the men he worked with but also his own family and the upper-class background he came from. His own brothers and sisters regarded him with profound distaste. Partly as a result of his dissident views, but mostly because he was a policeman.
    While showering, he wondered if he would die that day.
    It was not a foreboding. He’d wondered the same thing every morning since he was eight years old and brushed his teeth before dragging himself reluctantly off to Broms School on Sturegatan.
    Lennart Kollberg lay in his bed dreaming. It was not a pleasant dream. He’d had it before, and when hewoke from it he’d be dripping with sweat and he’d say to Gun, “Put your arms around me, I had such an awful nightmare.”
    And Gun, who’d been his wife for five years, would put her arms around him and right away he’d forget everything else.
    In the dream, his daughter Bodil is standing in the open window five stories above the street. He tries to run over to her, but his legs are paralyzed and she starts to fall, slowly, as if in slow motion, and she screams and stretches her arms out toward him and he fights to reach her, but his muscles won’t obey him and she falls and falls, screaming all the time.
    He woke up. The scream in the nightmare became the drilling buzz of the alarm clock, and when he looked up he saw Bodil sitting astride his shins.
    She was reading
The Cat Trip.
She was only three and a half and she couldn’t read, but Gun and he had read the story to her so many times they all knew it by heart, and he could hear Bodil whispering it to herself.
    “A little old man with a big blue nose, all dressed up in calico clothes.”
    He turned off the alarm clock and she immediately stopped whispering and said “Hi!” in a clear high voice.
    Kollberg turned his head and looked at Gun. She was still asleep, with the quilt pulled up to her nose, and her dark ruffled hair was a tiny bit damp at the temples. He put his finger to his lips.
    “Shh,” he whispered. “Don’t wake Mommy. And don’t sit on my legs, it hurts. Come up here and lie down.”
    He made room for her to creep down under the quilt between him and Gun. She gave him the book and arranged herself with her head in his armpit.
    “Read it,” she ordered.
    He put the book aside.
    “No, not now,” he said. “Did you get the newspaper?”
    She scrambled across his midriff and picked up the newspaper, which was on the floor beside the bed. He groaned, lifted her up and put her back in the bed beside him again. Then he opened the paper and started to read. He made it all the way to the foreign news on page twelve before Bodil interrupted.
    “Papa?”
    “Mmm.”
    “Josha did a big job.”
    “Mmm.”
    “He took off his diaper and put it on the wall. All over the wall.”
    Kollberg put down the paper and groaned again, got out of bed and went into the children’s room. Joshua, who would soon be one, was standing up in his crib and when he saw his father he let go of the railing and sat down on the pillow with a little bounce. Bodil had not exaggerated his adornment of the wall.
    Kollberg picked him up under one arm, carried him into the bathroom and rinsed him off with the shower hose. Then he wrapped him in a towel and went in and put him down beside Gun, who was still asleep. He rinsed out the bedclothes and the pajamas, cleaned the crib and the wallpaper and got out a clean diaper and a fresh pair of plastic pants. Bodil scampered along beside him through it all. She was very pleased that for once his irritation was directed at Joshua instead of at herself, and she clucked and fussed officiously at her brother’s bad behavior. When he’d finished cleaning up it was after seven thirty and there wasn’t any point