Free The Man Who Went Up In Smoke by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö Page B

1935. Evidently no one had taken the trouble to lie to him.
    He had bad luck on his journey home and ended up on a modern fast-moving ferryboat with roofed decks and growling diesel engines. There were only a few passengers on board—nearest to him sat two old women in gaudily colored shawls and bright dresses. They were carrying large white bundles and presumably had come from the country. Farther away in the saloon sat a serious, middle-aged man in a brown felt hat who was carrying a briefcase and wearing the facial expression of a civil servant. A tall man in a blue suit was whittling listlessly at a stick. By the landing stage stood a uniformed police officer, eating figure-eight-shaped cookies out of a paper cornet and talking sporadically to a small, well-dressed man with a bald head and a black mustache. A young couple with two doll-like children completed the assemblage.
    Martin Beck inspected his fellow passengers gloomily. His expedition had been a failure. There was nothing to indicate that Ari Boeck had not been telling the truth.
    Inwardly he cursed the strange impulse that had made him take on this pointless assignment. The possibilities of his solving the case became more and more remote. He was alone and without an idea in his head. And if, on the other hand, he had had any ideas, he would have lacked resources to implement them.
    The worst of it was that, deep down within himself, he knew that he had not been guided by any kind of impulse at all. It was just his policeman's soul—or whatever it might be called—that had started to function. It was the same instinct that made Kollberg sacrifice his time off—a kind of occupational disease that forced him to take on all assignments and do his best to solve them.
    When he got back to the hotel it was a quarter past four and the dining room was closed. He had missed lunch. He went up to his room, showered and put on his dressing gown. Taking a pull of whisky from the bottle he had bought on the plane, he found the taste raw and unpleasant and went out to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Then he leaned out the window, his elbows resting on the wide window sill, and watched the boats. Not even that managed to amuse him very much. Directly below him, at one of the outdoor tables, sat one of the passengers on the boat: the man in the blue suit. He had a glass of beer on the table and was still whittling at his stick.
    Martin Beck frowned and lay down on the creaking bed. Again he thought the situation over. Sooner or later he would be forced to contact the police. It was a doubtful measure and no one would like it—at this stage not even he himself.
    He whiled away the tune remaining before dinner by sitting idling in an armchair in the lobby. On the other side of the room a gray-haired man wearing a signet ring was reading a Hungarian newspaper. It was the same man who had stared at him at breakfast. Martin Beck looked at him for a long time, but the man tranquilly went on drinking his coffee and seemed quite unconscious of his surroundings.
    Martin Beck dined on mushroom soup and a perch-like fish from Lake Balaton, washed down felicitously with white wine. The little orchestra played Liszt and Strauss and other composers of that elevated school. It was a superb dinner, but it did not gladden him, and the waiters swarmed around their lugubrious guest like medical experts around a dictator's sickbed.
    He had his coffee and brandy in the lobby. The man with the signet ring was still reading his newspaper on the other side of the room. Once again a glass of coffee was standing in front of him. After a few minutes, the man looked at his watch, glanced across at Martin Beck, folded up his paper and walked across the room.
    Martin Beck was to be spared the problem of contacting the police. The police had taken that initiative. Twenty-three years' experience had taught him to recognize a policeman from his walk.

Chapter 12

    The man in the gray suit took a calling